i can’t write

my internship paper or my article. i need to sleep and i need to not do this tomorrow morning. i’m slowing down.

thoughts, too many; time too slow

from these foolish fingers wisdom doth not flow

for in time there will be no more

time for anything but a poor man, a bore

with little joy and still less hope

does he sit around and idle, mope

can i

just sleep for a few days?

haiti and heidi montag

i’ve been gone for ages (duh), but it’s mostly be on account of a mass of newish things that are occupying my time. i’ve started working at the daily beast, and it’s been a thrilling block of time that has filled out any remaining room in my schedule (with law school job, KAPi, daily bruin, and school, my schedule is starting to look like alex jeffries’s!).

anyway, most of the work i do here in the la bureau is related to entertainment or celebrity news. in the wake of the haitian earthquake, there has been a somberness that i wasn’t sure actually happened in entertainment circles after tragedies. but alas, it does. everyone here has had small tv’s playing anderson cooper, and while work must get done, the focus on posting links to gossip seemed to have slowed a bit.

i know this because that is a part of my job (to find the news to post), and my google reader was significantly less full these past few days. if anything, the focus has been on what stars are (and aren’t – hi kanye west) helping haiti.

but now, a week after the earthquake, things are picking up again. it really does feel like heidi montag’s “i’m going to replace my face with a white rubber eraser” story set the entertainment news world back on pace. it’s a bit disorienting, as I alternate between “cheating” stories on Haiti’s burial mounds and simon cowell and kanye west.

another blog coming soon about the bank bonus outrage and how the problem is that no one wants to admit that capitalism is unnatural.

melville

i’m at anna’s apartment. the sink drips ominously and the fridge grumbles. muted bass drips in from next door, an oppressive chorus of three beats. but everything else is still. the modernist coffee table is set crookedly in relation to the couch, but one is modernist wood and the other is soft florals so i guess that’s the idea anyway.

there is a midcentury armchair next to a mid-90’s television. a chabby chic letter-writting desk fills space. a white book case, microwave, and mini-fridge make that corner more chabby-chic than i had realized until this moment. generally, i hate white furniture. it always looks unfinished to me. or maybe so damn finished that it emits a suffocating vibe of finality. it’s as though all the white furniture in the world collectively tells you, “we were too good for paint.” it could be worse though: primary colors.

my boss asked me to skip work tomorrow to ensure that my virality (pun) is adequately diminished. i’ll be home all day, no room mate. i have a shakespeare essay to write and i imagine i’ll try to start that fairly early. get a nice big, yolky breakfast in and sit down with the riverside. or at least a passage from othello. we shall see.

lsat scores released as early as friday and no later than monday. not feeling too great about it but that’s probably a defense mechanism at play. lower the expectations, build up the anxiety. hopefully it will make for a good or decent start to a great weekend with some friends from home (read: from cal) and an enjoyable albeit early day at the rose bowl. the historic rose bowl, that no one cares about.

anna’s cutting some dragonfruit. it’s bright and layered on the outside but she tells me its black and white inside. black and white fruit. almost logically impossible. a grayscale hat for the chiquita banana girl.

discussion today momentarily centered on the fact that the recipe of coke is so highly guarded. we decided there was no need, for two reasons. one – coke is the only company that can legally import coke plants (they’re not called coke plants). two, even if someone made the same exact drink, it is highly likely that it would not “taste as good” to anyone that likes coke. marketing tastes good. and coke markets well. i said probably the best, with nintendo as a second place. i suppose apple is in the top five. and maybe chiquita bananas.

the fruit is here now, it is literally white with black spots. like poppy seeds, like coke. like cheap imitation marble. white watermelon marble, tasteless. nature’s wonders.

slow writing for a slow day in a slow week, with a slowly developing solipsism.

senior

this year is reading heavy. actually – it might not be more reading heavy. i think it’s actually that i’m giving completing about 90% of my reading an earnest effort. regardless, i’m getting lost between the super messed up world of shakespeare and the super “i don’t care about you wasps” world of edith wharton. edith wharton was  a racist, by the way. i wish i knew this during SAT training when some pseudo (or proto) feminists responded quite angrily to my declaration that the edith wharton piece in TPR’s sat manual was unfit for mass consumption because it was entirely boring. it’s hard to teach a bunch of high school boys about literature when the first example they see is about how one woman’s living conditions are so unsightly because her cook also cleans.

of course, there are the nuances.

goals for this year – exercise more than i have in the past two weeks. guide pad through times tough and boring with minimal drama for the members. my phone has already begun ringing about every 30 minutes (with some inane questions…”what is the exec email?”), which is actually fun in an interesting way. phone ringing during exec with call that must be taking…not so fun.

at some point i should take this blog back from daily updates and “i hate the lsat but kinda love it” to the exploration of some grander thoughts (or grander topics). un/fortunately, those thoughts seem to occupy one’s mind when they are feeling especially down, which i haven’t really had to face lately. i’ve fallen into mostly happy routines, but routines always make me uneasy and make me crave some form of the hurtling sensation. in my experience, the most interesting people are either those that are entirely at peace, or constantly facing some sort of evolutionary tension. i’m far too young for peace, and i’m banking on the next decade or so of my life to provide me with enough tension to retain some level of personal interest.

but maybe the most interesting people are actually the ones that are at peace in the center of continual turbulence. in that case, we all have a lot of work to do. it’s an admirable goal, but i’ve never been especially calm. i don’t believe in stressing over many things (academics, grades, clothes, hair), but sometimes i feel hyper antsy at the smallest things. i wish i could attribute that to some grand artistic tendency, but that seems like a stretch.

but then again, maybe i’m just not seeing it.