Rand and

On Sunday I fucked up my leg pretty bad, my left tibia more precisely. I've self-"diagnosed" it as a bone bruise and it's been difficult to walk. Kaylee has a trampoline and I fell while doing back flips. That's really all I want to say because I'm embarrassed that the whole thing was the result of such foolery.

In spite of my new gimp status, we went to the Monroe State Fair; I wheeled a wheelchair that we had borrowed from Kaylee's Grandmother, and all of us wore raincoats to no avail against a steady, typical rain shower. If you have never spent a day in a wheelchair in public I suggest you do. Even though the constraint of slow and meager movement annoyed me, I'm grateful for the new perspective. At a festival there is a huge age range, and on several occasions I found myself naturally connecting to the extremes: the young and the old using canes and wheelchairs. It was unusual, my typical interactions consist almost entirely of people my age and--for the summer--no more than ten years my elder; During the school year my professors offer a diversity in age, but still I do not usually engage young children nor people over sixty-five. I suppose it isn't surprising given I was their same height, or shared some impairment. I enjoyed the variety, and it made the fair enjoyable. The rain sucked way more than the wheelchair.

My neighbor, Limen, lent me his wooden cane...so pimp right now...and I can actually walk around now instead of a half hop half crab walk.
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Ayn Rand is a talented philosopher and story-teller. I'm grateful for the story-telling because it presents the philosophy in an entertaining way, even if it makes the book five times longer (much appreciated after an entire year of concise Rice.) That's about as far as my literary criticism goes, but the philosophy was dense, multi-faceted; more than any other philosopher, I find my agreement to Rand's array of beliefs fluctuating from strong approval to disgust.
She weaves together four major themes from nearly every corner of philosophy.
metaphysics: objectivism
epistemology: reason
axiology: individualism i.e. self-interest
political: libertarian capitalism

She believes that all of her philosophy stems from just two principles: the law of non-contradiction and the assumption that existence is superior to non-existence. The second principle manifests itself in all organisms as the desire for life. Plato would have called this the organism's nature. It is in every person's nature to be alive and act in such a way that promotes life, just as it is in every flower's nature to stay alive. The flower grows toward sunlight because that is how it stays alive. Likewise, in order for a human being to stay alive, it must work. All other species are essentially hunters or gatherers, but we work for money so that we can buy food. Whenever I watch the show Planet Earth, I'm reminded how different life is for a human being compared to any other species. Film making, in Planet Earth's case: the artistic process of documenting observations, itself is completely unique to human beings. Obviously....there are differences between us and the beasts. Yet another is suicide. It's pretty eerie that our specie and our specie alone has the ability to drive an individual to the point of voluntarily ending its life / nature.
All these differences, Rand would say, exist because human beings have developed minds. In response to the suicide example, she seems committed to say that anyone who commits suicide is either insane or ignorant about what is good for them.
So far I agree, because "life" is interpreted to mean a healthy life. Other animals live to stay alive, but there is something more for us. We are to live happily, joyfully, with purpose and meaning. I can't think of any circumstance where ending a life would promote joyful life. Some cancers can be severely painful and interminable, becoming so painful that the patient is unable to focus on anything but the pain. Ending this sort of life seems justifiable to me so long as consent by the patient is given. Maybe something like this goes on with an emotionally or socially ill person. I haven't done any research on this at all, so I don't want to write out of ignorance, but my instinct tells me that it is very difficult to know if a person is chronically socially / emotionally ill, but easy to tell if a person is chronically physically ill. Either way, her point is that by favoring life, we not only strive for a heartbeat and survival, but we strive for a particular type of life, namely, a joyful one.
She goes on to say that every relationship should be modeled after those between traders, where no value is freely given. She is comparing people to any other resource or item to be used for the purpose of pleasing the self. A broken toaster is useless, and no one would pay money (the benefit of their hard work) for it. In addition, she believes that "moral bankruptcy" is punishing people for their virtue and rewarding them for their vices. She applies this logic to humans, and if a person is lazy, unwilling to work, unprincipled, then (s)he does not deserve to be loved, because that would be rewarding the person's vices. whoa, big statement. I'm not really sure what to make of it.
I went to a free food bank today with a friend who needed some food for himself and his dog. This person is homeless by choice and works as a musician on the streets. While we were there he asked if I wanted any food and I didn't take any because I wasn't sure if this food bank is erupting at the seems with free food or if they were carefully rationing it out to only people who desperately needed it. I erred on the latter. None of the workers were at all surprised, I think because I was using my cane they may have thought I was laid off or some serious medical shit, but really I was just a dumb-ass who fell off a trampoline. It would be interesting to know just how abundant the food is, my guess is not much, and because I am fully able to work and pay for food, I find it a privilege to do so.
There are some wonderful kernels of thought that have stuck with me, and even though I often disagreed with her, she is worth reading. "It is not death that we wish to avoid, but life that we wish to live."

there's so much more, but that's a start.