This weekend I have been very mean. I told someone I barely met that he seems self-absorbed, stuck-up, and artificial.

People tell me to not judge until I really know a person. Everyone makes judgments. Who is to say that after I hang out with someone a few times I can claim to know him or her anyway. At some point, we need to make a judgment about each person that we interact with, and that judgment determines the degree and nature of future interactions. What they really mean is to not voice your judgments, and even then, it only applies if it is a negative judgment. Five minutes after I meet someone, I am allowed say she is very nice; but if I say she seems like a bitch, immediately I will be attacked with snide remarks about not judging others.

Can we ever say that we can really know anything absolutely? Everything we perceive can be reduced to nerve signals in our brain, and our interpretation of those signals. Every interpretation is a judgment, for example, when I judge a collection of thin rectangular signals to be a rectangular prism. Look at it from a different angle, I process more signals and realize it is a cylinder. Watch it over time, and you realize its a melting cylindrical ice cube.

In social relationships, every experience is a signal, and our judgments are formed from a series of experiences, which can change from two dimensional to three and four.

Why do we all keep silent about our criticisms and negative judgments? Why is it better for us to verbally repress ourselves while preserving mental judgments? Verbally expressing those judgments is the only entry point for one to change his or her thoughts; it gives people opportunities to either corroborate or dispute your claims. Thus, without saying negative things about people, we would continue to harbor these negative thoughts in our minds while pretending to be a cheerful nonjudgmental person. Expressing negative thoughts is the only way for any progress to ever be made. Repressing them and only reiterating the positive results in stagnation and solidification of the status quo.

The caveat is that after voicing your opinion, you must be open to changing your opinion if presented with counter-evidence. Expect your assumptions to be challenged, since that is the entire basis for the merit of voicing them. Don’t let the first, second, third, or infinith impression be engraved in stone; rather, know that your impressions of people are only transient incomplete portraits filled in by a collection of experiences. People are like physical systems: they are impossible to study because in studying your subject, you perturb the system. People are constantly changing; as soon as your portrait is finished, she has already grown into different person.

Someone told me today to “be the bigger person”. I say: Wipe off your moral superiority and realize that we are all on the same playing field.

Mood: 4 obviously in a mood to rant + lonely after my friend left + possibly PMS

Physical Tiredness: 3 AM and have class at 9

Spiritual Tiredness: 4 Physical tiredness leaking over into spiritual + nervous about future + talked about MCAT