commercial

So there's this commercial that's been bothering me. Maybe you've seen it. Perhaps you haven't had the honor.

Let me describe it to you.

On the couch sits stereotypical uninterested parent, intently watching the football game in perfect privacy and happiness. However, suddenly, in walks stereotypical hopeful-yet-bound-to-be-disappointed young child with a book in his hands and a cutsey grin on his face. He politely asks his dad if he would read to him. But then, in a dramatic turn of events that would make Arthur Miller blush, he notices that his dad is actually watching the football game. The child, hopes dashed and existence deflated, "Oh...football..." The father, desperate to resolve the situation with the least possible creativity, says to his son: "No, {insert name of son], that's okay. I can stop time!!!" He then proceeds to heroically push the pause button on his Tivo thing, making the game freeze in time. The son, who just moments ago was throwing a rope around the shower curtain rod, preparing ot hang himself to ease the misery he has gone through with an uninterested father all of his 5 short years, suddenly is bewildered, amazed, even infatuated by this abrupt turn of events. He giggles in girlish delight, and says to his father, who is now so dumbfounded that his idiotic plan not only made his child forget all about the book but allowed him to continue watching the boob tube, "Do it again!". The father then snaps his fingers and makes the game stop, allows his son to snap and stop the game, and so on and so forth. The book is then shown impailed with blood everywhere.

Ok, so that last sentence was made up. But here's the message I get from the good people at DirecTv (who have a spelling issue as well, apparantly):

DirecTv: Buy our TV thingy! Your kid will be so fascinated, you won't have to read to him anymore! You lazy bastard.

Lazy, selfish bastard.

piccy!!!

You know

I dislike holidays immensly. Halloween. Christmas. New Years. St. Patty's. Valentine's. Hate 'em.

Thanksgiving is alright. Mother's Day is the bomb.

wish i could write

I was sitting when the door groaned opened and an umbrella was shaken off in my apartment. I didn’t turn from staring at the at the rain running down the glass of my window.
“Hey, I came to pick up my things,” she said. I didn’t say anything. “Did you put them in the box like I told you to?”
“Yeah,” I said, shifting my head heavily in her direction. I pointed towards the kitchen. “It’s on the table.” She was wearing a purple scarf, a light blue sweater and some old beat-up blue jeans. A few strands of brown hair stuck to her forehead, and her dark eyes looked piercingly succinct and to the point.
“Thanks,” she said. I couldn’t tell with what emotion the ‘thanks’ had come with. I was sick of trying to figure that kind of thing out anyway. I could faintly hear the rain coming down on the roof as I looked at it through the window.
Her shoes knocked on the floor into the kitchen. The knocking stopped. “There was enough to fill two boxes?”
I tilted my head back and sighed aloud. “Obviously,” I though to myself. “Are you going to answer?”
“Yes, there was enough to fill boxes. That’s why there are two boxes filled with your shit.”
“My shit,” I heard her say under her breath. “Well, look, I have to be somewhere in a few minutes, could you maybe help me out and take one of these down to my car?”
“Yeah,” I said, and pushed the blanket off of my bottom half. “What?” she yelled from the other room. “Yes, I’m coming,” I enunciated. “Thank you. You know, you should really get out of this apartment once in a while. It would be good for you. You don’t look very presentable.”
I went into the kitchen and picked up the heavier of the two boxes. “I put your keys on the table next to the door.” I started to walk towards the door. “Don’t you want to put on a raincoat or something?”
“No, I’m fine. Really. A little rain can’t kill me.” She tilted her head and said “Alright,” enthusiastically. I ground my teeth together slightly. “Let’s go downstairs, if you’ve got that date or whatever you need to get to.”
“It’s not a date. I’m just going with some of my friends, and our reservation is for 8:30 and I need to be there on time.”
“Right.”
I made my way carefully down the two flights of stairs and out to her car. “Would you like me to open the trunk for you?” I asked quietly, making my way around to the front driver’s door. She popped it open with her key clicker and smiled crookedly at me. “No thanks, I got it.”
I loaded my box into the trunk and stared at her as she did the same with the box she was holding. “What are you looking at?” I looked away. The rain was coming down softly but steadily.
“Sorry.”
“Look, you cant just sit up there and mope about me. I said I’d love to get together once in a while. You know? What more do you want out of me?” She foldd her arms tightly. I could see the rain coming down in the light of the streetlamp.
“You know,” I said, my eyes to the ground.
“Yes I know, but that’s not possible anymore. Do you understand that?”
“You should get to your thing.”
“I should. I’ll talk to you later. Have a nice night. Maybe call up Joe or someone and see a movie?"
“I’ll think about it.”
“Yeah, think about it, David.”
She closed the trunk and walked to the driver's door, opened it and shut it quickly. The engine started and she drove off.
I walked back towards the door of my building, my hair wet and my hands numb. I stared at my fingers for a moment, then opened the door and climbed the two sets of stairs again.
I shut the door. The room looked the same as when I had left it. The light was still on and there were still a few glasses and some bottles on the kitchen table. All that left was the two boxes.
I went to the pantry and looked inside, saw nothing to my fancy, cursed the wood it was made out of and slammed the door shut. I stood for a minute comparing the loudness of the slam to the silence of the room that enveloped it so quickly, like ants devouring a dropped crumb of bread. I poured myself half a glass of water and downed it, and went back to my chair beside the window. I looked at the clock. 8:28. Deciding that I had not listened to the radio in a good long time, I flipped it on to the FM position. It was a cheap radio and none of the stations came in clearly due to the inclement weather. After rolling the dial back and forth to its extreme points a few times, I put my head against the glass and hoped to feel the rain’s tapping on my head through the window. I closed my eyes and let the static of the radio lull me to sleep.

Creative Writing 101

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4. Every sentence must do one of two things -- reveal character or advance the action.

5. Start as close to the end as possible. (love that one for some reason)

6. Be a sadist. Now matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them -- in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

- Kurt Vonnegut

Holy

Well, I'll be darned.

Is it really already time to turn one's clocks back?

I used to just rely on the TV Guide channel, but now I am putting my weight on my sprained ankle suffered during a game of Midnight Ultimate.

-oof-

-wobble-

"She scooped the nibblies?"
"yes. that's what was so vexing."

the simple things in life

I wrote in my essay: she is dragged by the ear by two nameless servants

and Microsoft Word wanted to change it to: the ear by two nameless servants drags her

yay

utter randomness

i never saw these people before that day. i will never see them again. i dont remember their names. but goddam it, i will live forever with them within this picture.

strength and weakness

you know

im trying to wring this thing to death and not look at it at the same time but one look and my gut drops out and i'm trying to run away from it but it's always going to be there even as far away as i am.

im afraid of it. water gets through insignificant cracks in a wall. drowns and grows.

its worth not going home

sort of.

No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the sources of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed, and love of power.
~P.J. O'Rourke

hmm.

"I cannot conceive of a god who rewards and punishes his creatures or has a will of the kind we experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death; let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egotism, cherish such thoughts. I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the Reason that manifests itself in Nature."
— Albert Einstein

Disc

I went to my first ultimate tournament today. It was in Rhode Island, which is really just ridiculously cool, because it's neither a road nor an island, which i learend first hand. But

Before we got there we stopped at dunkin donuts (it's new england, duh) at about 715 in the morn, cause though CT is a small state, small enough to fit in California's back pocket, it's big enough that you have to drive alittle bit to get out.

Well, I'm used to temperatures that are closer to my grandparents' age. But uhh lately they've been more my parents' age, and plummeting closer to my cousins' age, and sooner or later it's going to be my age. But anyway, so it must have been about 40 degrees, raining, 720 in the morning at a dunkin donuts in haaht-fud when somebody realises they keys were in the car and all the people were outside of the car, leading to a problem, this being that you need a key to get into the car, to get the key, which was in the car.

So we waited outside for, a while, as the rest of our team made its way to the 4 x 6 ft piece of land that is Rhode Island. We stood and stood and stood. it was

c
o
l
d

but then the Triple A man came and broke into our car and all was good.

Then we went to the tournament which was....cold. We lost, but it was fun, because, hell it was in Rhode Island for gosh sakes. It's a whole other state! An hour away!

roger williams, you old dog.

was there a point to this?

i forget.

A Treatise Part Un

"Please, have a seat."
"Alright." I sat. The chair's arms were high, so my elbows rested at an uncomfortably obtuse-angled position from my body. The rich brown leather was cold, but the imposingly girthy chair warmly embraced me like a kindergarten teacher might embrace a child worried his mother wouldn't be coming back to pick him up.
The walls in the room were covered with degrees and awards adorned with overly formal handwriting and many-pointed gold stars. The frames were simple and matched the rest of the decor in the room, which was, so to speak, doctorly. A conservative colored wooden desk ran the half of the length of the wall to my left, on top of which ran a shelf covered in green and red and yellow folders overflowing with what looked like charts. On the black screen of the computer monitor was a small post-it note. Scratched onto it were a few words in illegible handwriting.
To my right was a bookcase filled with thick volumes gathering light dust. A few bookmarks poked their heads out of the top of each of them. On the second shelf to the bottom there was a stereo, but it was off, and the rigid digits of the digital clock stared me in the face without emotion.
The doctor sat opposite me in a simple wooden chair. He kicked off his shoes, which apparantly had been untied, and put his feet up onto the low-lying coffee table that seperated us. He had what must have been my chart in his hands, a yellow one, with just a few papers in it. He spent most of his time on the top page, then quickly flipped through the other three or four. He looked up at me.
"Well, I suppose I know what medications you're on and such, but I think before we can have a trusting relationship here, we should talk a little, build that trust."
His gray hair overflowed from his head and down in neat lines to form thick sideburns that stopped at the ear. Creases accompanied his eyes when he squinted or smiled faintly, which he seemed to do a lot, but they disappeared when his eyes were wide open. He wore a red sweater that seemed well-worn, gray slacks, and his socks were pitch black, but i could make out individual toes through the light fabric.
My eyes glanced quickly over to the digital clock, which had stayed where it was. It read 11:03.
I smiled quietly and nodded in agreement. My palms were sweating. I pulled my arms from the arms of the chair and let them fall on my knees. I tapped my fingers lightly.
"Is there anything specific you'd like to start with?" he asked. He looked straight at me. My eyes wandered to the arms of the chair surrounding me on two sides.
"Ahm...not really, not that I can think of."
He looked at me with the same look as before, but the corners of his lips lifted a tiny distance. The clock read 11:07.
A few seconds passed by drugingly. The doctor's patience annoyed me. I rolled my fingers into fists on my knees and slid my top and bottom teeth against one another.
"Well, I thought perhaps we should talk about..." At this point he pulled a pen out of the pocket in his shirt underneath his sweater and tapped the back end of it on the folder, which was now opened. "...why you're here."
I drew in my breath as my hearbeat started to quicken. I bit my tongue and tilted my head, and I visualized taking the folder, ripping it in two, setting fire to it, stomping it out, screaming to all hell, keying the doctor's car, walking all the way home, and taking the pills and swallowing them all in one vicious gulp.
"Alright," I said under my breath.

Blowing Eyre

Some possible titles for my essay about the Jane Eyre adaptation into a movie:

Musical Eyres
The Eyre up Th-Eyre
To Eyre is Human, This movie was awful
Walking on Eyre
There's something in the Eyre tonight
Breathe...Breathe in the Eyre (pink floyd)
Eyre Products (hair...)
Eyre Heads
Getting Eyre Time
Eyre-ea 51
She has a certain Eyre about her
Choking on Eyre
Love is in the Eyre

I could go on. But I won't.

The sounds of Poetry

It's a beaten horse, but poetry is like a butterfly, or some other delicate animal. It's beautiful to look at, an awe-inspiring piece of nature that really makes the entire world seem as if it drinks from the same fountain of existence. But they when you try and figure out why it is beautiful, look really closely at it, examine it from all sides, you end up with butterfly parts strewn across the floor, a dirty microscope lens, and a dead animal, which is significantly less pretty that it was before you examined it.

Such, my friends, is poetry. I'm reading a book called "The Sounds of Poetry", 129 glorious pages of describing the nuts and bolts of poetry: why some of it works, why some doesn't, what rhyme can mean, etc, etc. Supposedly it will help my understanding of poetry and help me APPRECIATE poetry more. So after about 16 pages of another chapter of the book I had to put it down for fear i would never want to read another poem again.

To follow up on the butterfly example.

A child: "Look at the butterfly! It's so pretty!"
A person after reading "Sounds of Poetry"-esque book except replace poetry with butterflies: "Look, there's a Lepidoptera flapping its wings at a rate of 40 beats per minute gliding southward to migrate because the weather up north is too cold for the larva to exceed their minimum weight requirements for hatching!"

And by that time the thing is gone already.

And, by the way, butterflies are extremely scary close up. As is poetry, eh?

This idea that everything has a meaning, i sincerely doubt it, especially in the field of literature. Yes, of course, there is some in certain cases, but for some reason academics feel the need to dress everything up with meaning to look smart, or something.

So while I look at all the little things that I might not be happy with in my life and try to find out WHY they are happening and if i can change them, I'm falling into that trap. Isn't it enough that I can breathe?

It must be, because before there was college or girls with pretty faces and glasses or reading or grades or anything, people must have had some reason to not just throw themselves to a wolley mammoth and be eaten.

What are the alternatives to existing? I guess its too late for me not to exist, but whatever is the opposite of existence is, it can't be that bad, because nobody's ever come back from doing it.

Portnoy

Doctor, what do you call this sickness I have? Is this the Jewish suffering I used to hear so much about? Is this what has come down to me from the pogroms and the persecution? from the mockery and abuse bestowed by the goyim over these two thousand lovely years? Oh my secrets, my shame, my palpitations, my flushes, my sweats! The way I respond to the simple vicissitudes of human life! Doctor, I can't stand any more being frightened like this over nothing! Bless me with manhood! Make me brave! Make me strong! Make me whole! Enough being a nice Jewish boy, publicly pleaseing my parents while privarely pulling my putz! Enough!

~Philip Roth, "Portnoy's Complaint"

shashin

At the corn maze in Middlefield, Connecticut. A volunteer watches over the maze-figure-outers on the bridge.

日本語時

じゃあ、全部日本語をわすれたくないので、このエントリーは日本語でかきます。

今ぼくはつまらない。どうしてかわからないけど、僕は大学のけいけんはそんなことがないと思ういました。これを言う時にちょっとへんなかんじがあるんけど、なにもしたくない。いそがしくなりたい。


くそ。

huh

it was somebody's brilliant idea to have a beginning language class meet on a tuesday-thursday basis, which is ridiculous because everybody knows you need to be immersed when you first start a language in order to retain as much of the information as possible. and tuesday was a trinity day and thursday is yom kippur, how ironic that its taking the place of me studying hebrew, so it will be 11 days inbetween hebrew classes, in which i have barely learned anything so far.

כי עכשיו אני בעצמי לומד יורית

と今から三週間僕が一つ日本語のことばがおぼえったら、神様がたすけってね。

hooray for languages

the rest of new york, in five pictures.

^ Mecca.

Manhattan

new friend

I made a new friend on instant messenger tonight.

Her name is Skittle and she's really nice.

Skittlesoxi65 (1:15:11 AM): guess what? my roommate and I are getting naked you should come watch :-) www-Cutiepie-cz-tf
(replace the - with a Dot or period so you are able to go to the site, we'll be waiting for you :-)

she cuts right to the chase, i like that in a woman. shes really funny, too. i think we will really hit it off once they take 15 dollars per month off of my debit card.

its like God is sending me these women so i can have my choice.


she even sent me a picture, but it was a little inappropriate for our first conversation, and her face was partially blocked by a yellow many-pointed star that had "barely legal" in big letters in the middle, but she had pretty hair, that's for sure.

i think i'm in love. or, if this works out, in debt.

Profoundity

I can't believe it's not...

fuh-geddaboud it.

Sunday 2:00 am until Monday 2:00 am

First the Padres lost. They are were so incredibly average this year it was really amazing. No matter how close they got they always seemed to shoot themselves in the foot and screw it up somehow. They were always Charlie Brown running up to the football held up by the rest of the league, who then just lifted it up just as the Pads were about to kick it. We'll be better next year, hopefully. That's hopefully.

I woke up and hung out with Linda and her roommate Andrea. They are a fun bunch. We talked books, college, movies, philosophy, travel, new york, boston, girls, baseball, EVERYTHING. Oy so fun. Whats funny is to me it looks like they live real lives whereas I am just in college. But they seem to think that they still aren't in the real world. I'm starting to think that the real world doesn't exist.

I then went to an art gallery opening in this super shitty part of Brooklyn. It was in these apartments that were really amazing, but of course nobody will buy them because of the neighborhood. Twice people from the apartments started talking to me and asked me if I was interested in purchasing. I said no, bread is currently out of my price range so I think i must wait on buying an apartment. But then i realised that in not that long a time i will have to purchase a piece of land, so to speak. Scary, man. I live in my parents home! I don't even have to pay rent. But i can't walk around naked in the house.

Eeuwwh.

So then we got back and I hopped on the subway to go to the upper west side. Apparantly Sunday is confuse-the-out-of-towner day on the subway, so instead of taking the 3 to 96th and then the 1 to 116th i took the 2 to bowling green, the 5 to 96th and the 1 to 116th. not so bad, but the subways are loud and scary.

On the way I met Hava. This is teriffically random (did i spell that word right?), as i totally forgot she lived in the city and forgot her name temporarily and couldn't believe i would have this luck to be totally befuddled on the subway system and see a familiar face to help me out. Thank _____ (wink)! That was fun, we talked encinitas on the subway and about her studies, etc, amazing how in a city of 9.2 bzillion people i saw someone i worked at summer camp with. Hm.

Pretty full day, huh?

No.

I dropped my bags off at Vladimir's apartment (his bedroom for himself is as big as my entire room for 2 people. gnar gnar sauce). So i had an apple, even though i dont like apples, because i'm on vacation, and we walked to the subway and had indian food in the east village (i feel cool saying that). it was fuckin fantastic (though anything tastes good after 18 chicken and cheese subs with fries a week), and he took the bill, which was unnecessarily kind of him, considering he's already giving me room and tour guide (himself). We took the Staten Island ferry, and saw a foggy view of the city which was so beautiful, it looked mythical and gotham-esque. We talked about books and life and college and how he met people at harvard i had only dreamed about even looking at.

After the ferry we booked on over to Times Square, which, if you don't like bright lights and buildings that go up to the stratosphere, i don't suggest you go to. it was really quite incredible, and not only because they have a multi-story applebee's, but that it was absolutely full at a completely random time of the week. i took pictures and felt touristy.

So then we went to the grocery store and freakin bought some shit. Then I came back.

Done?

NO

I had a conversation for 2 and a bit hours. it was really quite wonderous. I felt like i talked too much, and i dont like it when people talk too much, so i hope i didn't talk too much. to = too = two. english sucks.

and now where am I? im not really sure, but it's not home, but maybe i have a new home bc when i thought about relaxing after this trip i pictured my bed in my room at trinity. funny how these things work.

Oh, and it's a little chilly. Keep it chilly. lay out.

"Holy shit"
- Discoverer of Grand Canyon



BOO

yeah that was pretty emo. sorry about that.

though i dont know if anyone reads this shit anyway

Wrapped tighter than a package
with brown and gold string;
sleep-walking, yawning,
it looks for a hole
to peek its head through,
find air,
and
ignite.

I had buried it again.
My callused hands wiped away
thick sweat off of
my brown forehead.
The shovel lay motionless,
asleep to my left,
snoring inaudibly.

But it found its way
outside anyway,
through my eyes.
I saw it in the mirror while
I shaved this morning,
showing its face;
its little red hands
shook my spine
like it was wet thread.

Six more weeks of
digging.

It's only a game.

"Baseball, it is said, is only a game. True. And the Grand Canyon is only a hole in Arizona. Not all holes, or games, are created equal."

Tomorrow brings the true beginning of fall. The leaves turn a passionate red and you count the trees in bunches of three and in lines of nine. The crack of the dried leaves and branches under your feet sails in the air and lands on heads tightly covered by cloth hats, proudly protruding from the forehead the simple, regal two letters representing 40,000 fans and 25 mere mortals who wear the symbol on their chests, protrusions of the heart, a soul wrapped in a white and blue linen, a leather-bound hand gripping the pill of a white ball, wound simply with red twine and represeing the contrast of good and evil, their interlocking bodies rising together as one to create the fire which imbues the crowd with the essence of all that passion stands for: all that is holy; the beautiful game.

I think I care about baseball too much.

I'm trying to figure out how I can watch Game 1 tomorrow in the basement of the Hillel. Normally I would be able to do this with no problem. Tomorrow is Rosh Hashanah. I am sure God is a Padre fan and not a Yankee fan. God goes for more substance with less luxury, which is the Padres, and not excess and snobbery, like the Yankees. So i think i'll be alright.

This game runs in my veins. It is such a study in tension and release, in passion. Everything has a buildup. Momentum switches like the swings of a pendulum. So many things must go right - so many things can go wrong. The team that deserves it doesn't win it sometimes, and it seems like all the time when it comes down to the wire. With one bounce of the ball i could be in tears or screaming and dancing in hysterics. Either way I will be as exhausted after watching a game as if I were actually playing in it.

My team hasn't been in the playoffs since i was 11 years old. There's a lot of buildup here. I might lose it and go insane.

It's likely.

I dont normally pray but perhaps i will this time.