inreaction

apparently i woke up in a city that never sleeps today.

but sinatra obviously never woke up in soho. it’s nice, but it’s quiet when it’s expected to be.

i’ll be here for quite some time. until the 11th. i suppose that gives me some time for reflection but i haven’t done a single second of it. maybe i’m finally reaching the last stage of enlightenlessness. what’s it called? unthinking fool? yeah. that one.

anyways if i never think then i never write. thus the lack of updates. nightly muse has been abandoned for quite some time now. i’m hoping to start updating both this page and that at some point, but i’m sure i’ll be coming back here much faster. as in within the next two weeks at most.

take care \\ come back \\ comment?

complete with annotations, the top ten things/places/activities/people/thoughts/emo-tions/blarghs of freshmen year:

10. moving to school.

it was quite nice. looking back, there were certain trends that developed in where / how i spent my time. at first, it was an almost exclusively floor experience. then i met a few people in classes, then i met a few people in the daily bruin, then i met a few people on another floor and made them involuntarily adopt me. then i came back to the floor for the last few days. all in all, there’s something extremely seductive about living “on your own.”

9. festival of books

seeing reza aslan speak was interesting. i was inspired by his youth, intelligence, and class. the panel i went to on faith and terror was fascinating and disturbing as it traced certain movements of the religious right within america. seeing gore vidal in royce was amazing. he is a man of limitless mental acuity, and i could only dream to have a writing career that breeds a fraction of the success he has experienced.

8. the daily bruin

although i did not put full effort into the bruin all quarter, i was thrilled to get the articles i did write published. i’m looking forward to writing much more come fall. being edited by the gang was a learning experience that was often interesting. and i met a lot of people that led me to meet a lot of people that led me to ultimately meet one person.

7. club a.5

when my suitemates swiped a couch from another floor’s lounge, madness ensued. we put it in the bathroom between our rooms, put up pictures on the walls, covered the lights with colored paper for ambience, set up vip lounges, designed and printed logos/promos, and generally created a frenzy unlike any the indie pop club world had seen before. we had a strobelight [andrew clicking on and off the flashlight], and a resident dj [my laptop]. it was good, clean, stupid fun. and if i learned anything this year, it’s that it’s good, clean, stupid fun that is the best.

6. undie run[s]

i could say something about freeing oneself of the prison of man’s clothes and the oppressive culture of retail, but really…it’s just fun to run in your underwear. it’s even more fun when there’s 5,000-10,000 people doing it with you. winter quarter’s run was my favorite.

5. filming the “this ain’t a scene” music video

again, good, clean, stupid fun. getting dressed up and dancing around a campus that people spend millions filming on is quite the grand experience. as much as we might pretend to hate it, the song stuck on us like the magnet holding up a child’s painting on a fridge. it was also fun to film and edit on our own.

4. bruin athletics

football games, basketball games, volleyball matches, and tennis matches. some favorites: [the obvious] beating ‘$c at home and “rushing the field,” heckling “flemming” at one of the basketball games, dancing and screaming at the top of my lungs at the rose bowl, winning an autographed volleyball after conor gave me the answer to the trivia question, admiring DC and all he stands for [think akon minus the grossness / violence], and giving a running commentary of the la/$c tennis match in a british accent.

3. concerts

from rooney to minus the bear to anberlin to xzibit, the concerts i went to this year were always enjoyable. there’s something about musical talent that gets me. it surpasses genre-taste to me. to a great extent, as long as its live music, i’ll listen to it and enjoy it.

2. late night trips to royce hall.

whether we were just bored or trying to make sense of our messed up thoughts after watching a movie as life changing as the girl next door, my favorite building on the planet always played a most hospitable host to our frolicks. my favorite was when alex and i, flush with frustration, booked it down there around two in the morning, only to see conor walking by a bit later [we had not told him we were going]. seems like royce even sends out invites to true friends.

1. hm. not sure what to title this.

when i look back on my first year, it’s not that everything else is dulled, or that i don’t value my other friendships as much. that said, my developing friendship and relationship with a certain anna do sticks out as the most memorable experience of the year. i could spend, and nearly have on many occasions, pages on why this is true, but this is supposed to be a brief list. suffice it to say, there has not been a single person in my life who has so gracefully combined comfort, intelligence, beauty, class, and humor. it’s only been half a day since summer started and already i can’t wait to see her again. [p.s. she's my favorite dork].

phew. didn’t think i could pick just ten things.

note: the following is in reaction to this post by a suitemate, alex jeffries of The Drivel.

i promise i didn’t include the picture to undermine his credibility.

regardless, his post was cause for both frustration and productive thought. often, i wonder if this is his self-determined cause for most things in life. in it, jeffries argues:

“I know people who talk a lot, but really don’t experience that much. I know people who experience so much but talk very little. The first group tries hard to be good at storytelling, and while they may captivate for the telling, their stories always leave something to be desired.”

i must concede that stories are best told by those who have stories to tell. that is, my grandfather’s 80+ experience of living in multiple cultures, experiencing things i’ve only read about [from life before widespread electricity in villages to communist summer camps] clearly has much more to say, and far more credibility, than yours truly.

and yet, i find that this experience is a plus, not a requirement for telling stories. some of the finest stories i’ve heard are about very little [...seinfeld?]. example? last night, a floormate’s friend was grinding against a door handle while trying to open it. did i experience much? no. but the laughter that ensued [and was reborn a few times as the story was told] clearly made it a good story.

in my friend’s search for a good story, he lays out a few criterion that he finds as defining a story as “good” or not worth telling. i disagree with most of them, and with the idea in general. i shall first respond to each point, then comment on the idea as a whole.

1. “If you tell something to someone else, you better have an answer if they ask, “So what?!”. A good way to avoid this is to think about the beginning, the middle/climax, and the end/resolution”

• ah, the infamous “So What?!” dilemma. i find that the majority of human communication does not have an answer to the “so what” debacle. in fact, most of the education we experience does not have an answer for the question. [i.e. "english is a subject-verb-object form language..." ...so...what?]
• additionally, i don’t think it needs to, or even should. enough of our lives are spent doing things only because we expect to get something out of them [school, jobs, some people's relationships]. telling a story, or listening to one, need not be an educational experience. furthermore, it need not be a fruitful experience at all. if you really need a “reason” for listening to a story, you can tell yourself you’re expanding your mind by being exposed to something you were previously ignorant to.

2.”People exaggerate to make their situation seem a lot more intense/awesome/extreme/bigger/better, right? I mean, if the situation isn’t one of those things to begin with, you’re either not telling it right, or not experiencing enough to merit the telling. “

• exaggeration is not something that most story tellers would take pride in. and yet, we find it everywhere we go [advertisements, daily conversation, internal conversation.
• one story that comes to mind [a collection of stories, rather] is the bible. [disclaimer: the word "story," which i will explore later in this post or later in general, can refer to truth or fiction. no need to get defensive if i call the bible a story]. the church has been split on what could be called “exaggerations”–on the eucharist, for example. i find that half of the fun of stories is often noticing the storyteller’s tempered use of exaggeration.
• lastly, exaggeration is essentially a literary technique. it’s called repetition, or hyperbole, or understatement [antonym].

3. “Just because it’s taking up more and more of our own time does not mean it should take up part of a social setting’s time. Don’t tell stories about MySpace or Facebook or instant messaging or anything like that, unless it eventually has some interaction with a real event. This is just my own philosophy, but for the most part, the internet does not matter.”

• as a note of dubious self-promotion, i find that i may have inspired [at least to some extent], this observation of jeffries. to some extent, i share this opinion. i dislike songs that mention text messages, or books [that are not labeled as science fiction] that center on the internet. but my distaste for such works stems from my nostalgic view of songs and books as timeless manifestations of the collective human “story.” a story being told to a friend may very well be relevant and entertaining.
• additionally, reluctance to talk about technology is not new. jeffries’s distaste for tales of the internet [although surprising given that he uses it to tell many of his own stories], is not new. it’s probable that people felt the same way when phones were coming into vogue.
• note of interest: jeffries includes stories centered on alcohol as stories not to be told. i agree with this matter, but only because it inspires personal annoyance.

essentially, i find stories to be undefineable. perhaps a quote from the movie adaptation [paraphrased] is fitting: “there are no rules. anyone who tells you rules about screen writing [or stories] is wrong.” stories can be personal or universal or both–they can be funny, they can be tragic. they can be cause for inspiration or hatred or both. they can be any number of things, but they cannot be stifled into any list of rules.

i noticed that my essay writing usually takes this pattern: absolutely no work until [at the very most] 48 hours before it needs to be turned in. at this point, i can finally block out all distractions [and stop making new ones] and begin to synthesize all of the thoughts i’ve had about the paper, or any research i’ve done.

so as i’m sitting here at 1:50, just over a day before my next paper is due [and two days before the one after that], i realize that i do the same thing in my life. sometimes i skate through life until i realize that time is up–that it’s time to think a bit. sometimes it happens because i’ve done something unthinking that has brought my unthinkingness to my own attention.

it’s a bit disorienting at times, and even more so when everyone else in my suite is asleep. regardless, think is what i’ve been doing for the past dazed hour or so, as the place marker in word blinks with indifference, as though it already knows i won’t be moving it anytime soon.

i was thinking of how it’s interesting that the scent of another’s hair could be a most effective sleep aid, and if corporations would go for the idea of bottling that sort of comfort instead of that found in centrifuges and man made chemicals. i was thinking of how often we make mistakes at the worst of times–when not only others but ourselves are tethering at the end of our ropes. how frightening and comforting can both describe true depths of caring–how vulnerable we are but how at peace we feel in the grips of such trust. i was thinking of how my relationship with the term role model has transitioned from one to wondering if they exist. seems odd–to need someone to play a role you could model.

seems like my thinking has been all too cliched.

Even now I get discouraged
Wonder if they take it all back while I still keep the courage
I refuse to be a role model
I set goals, take control, drink out my own bottles
I make mistakes, I learn from everyone
And when its said and done
I bet this Brotha be a better one
If I’m upset, you don’t stress
Never forget, that God hasn’t finished with me yet

Before we find world peace
We gotta find peace and end the war on the streets

[2pac - ghetto gospel]