After about five or ten minutes, we re-entered the hall, but it was filling up. So one of the friends (Luc, who I mentioned in my rant about that party) and I sat at one of the first front rows. Don't know why; maybe I wanted a better look at the stage.
At 9:00, the proceedings began. Firstly, we had a performance by a string quartet (that's a group of four musicians in music lingo). But it was bad; the violin player and the double bass player kept stuffing up the notes.
Then we had our opening speech. The theme for our conference was to be 'the good life'. She also gave out a brief discription about it (but it still made no sense; the only explanation I can give about this is that 'the good life' is that it's the best life you can live or a life you enjoy or like). Much of it was boring, and I forgot most of it just a few minutes after the speech ended (no wonder considering that the mircophone wasn't working properly). The only thing I remember clearly was that the speaker was talking about this incident in some South American country where a guitar player's hands were chopped off by a policeman because he played a song the cop didn't like. From then on, the musician became a conductor, and conducted using his stumps. I don't know if that was relevent to anything. Must have been said just to grab our attention.
When the speech was over, the speaker had asked everyone in the audience to write out some "wisdom" about the good life. I just didn't care about writing up some stupid quotes, so I wrote them a crappy one that wouldn't win the "competition for best quote" so that they would get the message. Luc had written something about "life being better if it was like crumbled meat". I learnt afterwards that his "wisdom" was close to winning the competition.
I was also amazed to see someone in my class write out two pages of "wisdom". When I asked him "what are you writing?", he said "go away! It's not your buisness!" What the hell would I want to do with that crap?! Bloody paranoia bastard! So uptight!
After about an hour, we were then presented with a hypothetical, a hypothetical discussion by students pretending to be philosopher. They were also to discuss "the good life". Well, it went dismally. It was as boring as watching paint dry. Mainly because they kept repeating the same thing all over and over again like a broken record player; "God is knowledge", "if there is no free will, then there is God, but if there is free will, then there is not God", "I've told you a hundred times! God has given us free will!" The most interesting part of this was when the student acting out as the character who said the last quote (some Christian philosopher) actually left the stage, walked away and yelled out to the student player the philosopher who said the second quote, "may God forgive you!". Everybody in the audience clapped. I thought it was over. But five minutes later she came back. Damn! By this time, at least half the audience's attention had drifted away, and they were now talking to themselves. Can't say that I blame them.
