Mavis will save us

this article expressed resentments against generation X that i didn't even know were festering deep in my soul.

"You guys got all the cool traits! Disaffection! Nihilism! Cynicism! Ironic distance! People just keep calling us idealistic. There is nothing sexy about idealism. And you guys have been laying this trip on us forever. In 1997, the Times looked at Mentos and Hanson and called us "edgeless." They dragged out Generation X rep Douglas Coupland to call us all uncool for liking the Spice Girls. We were little kids! Sorry I wasn't an edgy 12-year-old, Doug! I wasn't into Built to Spill yet!"

http://www.radaronline.com/features/2008/05/generation_y_versus_generation_x_winona_ryder_of_montreal_ap.php

i have been reading too much.

i didn't realize when i started my thesis what a handicap it is to take a piece of criticism, rather than an original idea you had about a piece of literature, as your starting point... have to resist the temptation to vacuum up information indiscriminately, deluding myself that it's research when i'm really just putting off thinking about or creating anything of my own.

northern virginia is more tolerable now that i venture outside fairfax county. i'm sitting in this cool coffee place in clarendon that's like a grungier small world... full of college students in punkish army green, drinking shmancy coffees from kenya and paupa new guinea. got a clean bill of health from the doctor today; that tight feeling in my throat isn't strep, or mono. sweet! had been feeling vaguely guilty about being out and about as a possible virus bomb.

someone gave me this song two years ago, and i just refound it today. (it was mislabeled in itunes! horror.) it makes me wish i'd been unemployed this summer for more than a week. (i'm not 100% behind the video's weird variable-gravity animals etc., but imeem's sucking so youtube will have to do.)

I don’t like it when my face tenses up with that little smile that hugs your jawbone too tight in the corners to be an expression of pleasure. When it happens you’re always trying to find something to do with your hands, clasping them behind your neck then around my knee then folding them in your lap. You know how every part of you sits, weight of ankle on ankle, slight tilt of the hip; your body is a fuzz of pressures. Every word is whispered a thousand times before it can be spoken, and the possibilities multiply into a fog. You’re amorphous and immobile, human static.

“There is only one way: Go within. Search for the cause, find the impetus that bids you write. Put it to this test: does it stretch out its roots in the deepest place of your heart?”

Most of my actions are controlled by habit or convention, programmed responses to external pressure. How many times a day do I actually will an action as opposed to submitting to it? How many of my actions (not just writing) have any roots in my heart at all?

A tree is a solid trunk that branches off at either end; all its possibilities come from itself, not from outside. Know what you need to do, and the rest is just white noise.

first things first: Kappa has a house now? shoddy journalism, NYT. shame.

Moreover, months of work uncovered no evidence that Dr. Ivins had traveled to Princeton, N.J., where investigators believe the letters were mailed. The closest connection was that a chapter house of Kappa Kappa Gamma, a sorority with which Dr. Ivins had a long and strange obsession, is located near the contaminated Princeton mailbox.

also, there's anthrax on some random mailbox in pton? and no one told me?
out of the loop, my friends.

i'm coming back from LA on saturday and i'm so exc-iiiii-ted
plans plans plans
whee

i lived through an earthquake yesterday. i didn't know, actually, until all the girls on hall poked their heads out of their doors to say "did you feel that?" ("feel what?") and i started getting concerned texts from the east coast. (i'm fine guys!)

another life milestone.

who talks about girls like that? have you ever talked to a girl before? you even have a sister. do you at least talk to your sister? then you'd know no one is impressed when you call the girls who bother to flirt with you fat or old, or insinuate that they're sluts.

ew

came back after the staff meeting today to take a nap and immediately remembered why i never take morning naps here: they're widening a roadway right outside my window. from here i watched a steam shovel work ever so delicately on a beech at the edge of the deepening ditch: the shovel nuzzling the tree's neck, peeling away strips of grey bark, bending (the tree seemed caught unawares) the hard resistant body toward the ground, coaxing, pushing, until the the roots gave out and the tree tumbled onto the ground.

i jumped out of a plane last saturday. i'm going to crib a description from an email to cx: "skydiving was beautiful and not even that scary - just supremely disorienting. i gasped like a fish, because you feel like you shouldn't be able to breathe, even though you can. by the time i learned to inhale again he had opened the parachute and we were gliding. definitely a weird experience, but no where near as intense as i imagined."

also they gave me a free tee shirt (a steal at $189!)