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Dinner party, no one came but Manda. I joked that inviting everyone else was an elaborate ruse to get us an evening alone together.

Mom went out to the bookstore and Dan Cloutier's performance at the arts center (she said the drummer was good) and left us alone.

I cooked and she did her homework.

(The food- more vegetable stir fry, but a little different: http://mlncn.com/node/1156 )

Talked about her work -- I didn't think about it but she didn't miss a single day when she was intensely sick last week, the week she had to cover for her boss; and worked Friday went home and slept 6:30 p.m. to noon Saturday, and then went to the Seacoast Outright "barnraising" fundraiser that I eventually made it to-- it raised $5,000.

And about her philosophy class and public speaking class (both online, heh). Public speaking teacher, a woman, loves her. One speech was graded A+++++++ and a smiley face. She critiqued another students speech that tried to argue I guess against violence in the media, saying he only let his children listen to Christion music. What about the passive violence and intolerance of some of this music, Manda asked. (Or the active violence, if there's old testament stuff in there, i added.) Philosophy class is good and the professor is interesting, but he won't give his opinion on anything, he stops there. Such as on euthanasia. And Plato's belief that people could not be taught stories with allegories, for they might act them out. The class drew the parallel with modern attempts to prevent people from seeing bad things or violence on television etc. Manda is very much against this. I've always disliked Plato, and censorship, but I'm a little more open to the argument than Manda. Generational gap :-P There seems to be a hell of a lot of violence on children's TV these days, and while she says Looney Tunes were violent and racist... well, something about the current crop of action cartoons, what little i've seen, seems worse. We are conditioned in some way by what we see, and it doesn't have to be evil. But censorship is always rotten. This goes back then to the ability to produce our own media.

(And now I'm wikipediaing my contention that there was a Socrates distinct from Plato, and apparently I'm in the middle of a grand historical/philisophical debate-- basically, to support my position (which many do) you have to argue that Plato's later representations of Socrates were less true to historical reality than earlier ones.)

I don't know. Stylistically, Socrates seemed always at odds with those in power– and asking questions to throw people off whatever they believed more than propounding his own theories, while Plato is like the original neocon think tank expert or philosopher for power.

Um anyway.

Lovely evening.