My thesis is now 50 pages long and more or less coherent. My thesis advisors are kicking my ass mercilessly. I am very, very close to mental burnout. What's depressing about this is the young pups surrounding me are apparently not only better read than I am, but also inexhaustably curious about everything, ambitious in the pure sense of tireless in ( Read more... )

Yeah, yeah, procrastination, whatever. Everybody knows I never touch this thing unless I have a major project due ...posthaste.

Anyway, I was stalking people I used to know long, long ago via the newly opened avenues of facebook (which is lovely, because then you can not only see if the person you've just found is actually someone of interest or ( Read more... )

So there's this kid in my English class who talks in not words or sentences, but paragraphs. Paragraphs taken from scholarly journals or graduate theses. The kind of paragraphs where I've forgotten what the subject of the sentence was by the second line, where the information communicated is so hopelessly arcane and disorganized I can't ever even ( Read more... )

The problem with words is that only a true master can use them to convey a mood as completely and accurately as movies, pictures, music-- immediate phenomena can. The problem with a journal is that at its heart it's only an attempt to record a mood. We're all a bunch of amateurs pounding away at our own mediocrity.

My sister finally tied me ( Read more... )

In 2001 Bush won and it was a travesty. Florida was a mess, Gore made a fool of himself, everyone was arguing; at the end of it all the sentiment was "What terrible fluke made this jerk the President of the United States?"

Four years later, people actually think he's the better option. This goes way beyond your guy losing. This is a feeling of I ( Read more... )

this is a sort of experiment, wandering pathways of another could-have-been life. i'm lured to read these scratches by their titles-- "erin's friends" it says, promises of security, poetry, connexions ethereal. but this notebook is no more mine than any other-- the only difference is i have the password. my friends don't seem to be contained ( Read more... )

After breaking the word limit commenting on Sowm's lj, I suppose I might as well post myself. It's been a long, long time since I wrote without a reason, and maybe my life could use a little chronicling. It's been a crisis-ridden week, and at the end of it I find myself here scratching in the dust--an ambiguous resting place. I know it's sort of ( Read more... )

I didn't have much else to do, so I relived a summer, a turning point. I started in June and followed until I realized something I hadn't before: that my life broke clean in the fall for more than just me. For me, the change was immediate, obvious, complete: an epiphany, no more subtle than birth. But outside my chrysalis the summer moon wanes, ( Read more... )

okay, well, i have to write something, and this is the least productive option. (i could justify that somehow under "getting started" or "ordering thoughts"...) there are very many things i need and/or want to do, but curiously all i tend to do is plan, vegetate, daydream, repeat. i'm not going to qualify that either, all you literalist ( Read more... )

ah, why not an lj update?
set the scene:
I'm sitting at my desk in my parents' house, listening to Song About An Angel and rubbing my flabby biceps, which are aching from lugging boxes in, out, and around cars. My room has most of the accessories of life missing; I'm watching the headlights of cars swing around the corner and vanish down the road ( Read more... )