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.

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.

lots, lots, lots on the mind. this is a bastard move but i’m going to the pen/moleskine tonight. wanted to post that today is the day my last year of undergrad starts, though this week for me is characterized by reduced work hours and a sense of overbearing, approaching lsat finality that clouds much of everything else.

i also need to shave.

it’s either going to be great or disappointing.

10 days left. let’s make it great.

i’m reading One L, and it is actually far more fascinating than i imagined. though it may be a bit bloated, the description of the ever dreaded first year of law school is fear-inducingly enticing. there is something raw yet refined about the sheer amount of work and pain that appears to go into it. i feel as though i’m moving closer and closer to feeling sure about law school.

the book involves a number of scenes with professors of different varieties, and i can see the personalities in the shape of some of the professors at work that confirm this nature of the experience. it seems an awesome challenge to put yourself through – the type of challenge i’ve been latently yearning for of late. something transformative and beneficial. in the first year alone one learns the basic tenements of contracts, torts (damages), criminal, lawyering skills, and civil procedure. in short, you add on pounds of knoweledge and you learn just how much you can learn – you push yourself beyond being pushed.

the undergraduate experience is surely stressful at times but most people, i think, would agree that if we truly dedicated ourselves to an academic life for the four years, we could all do pretty well. i thought i’d need some time before i felt ready to dedicate myself to law and law school, but i think i can enjoy this year and the following summer to prepare myself for the transformative hell of being a “one l.”

man. haven’t updated since michael jackson died. that must be a comment on many things.

but mostly a reflection of the lack of time for reflection. with work and test preparation, there has been enough room to fit in living but not enough to fit in writing about living. although i suppose if i was “a writer” then this would seem a bullshit distinction.

but here i am, tuesday night. going to yoga tomorrow with the boss after work. yoga on the grass with some of the world’s foremost legal scholars and the staff that supports them. if only i had a mat…

in truth i have lots on my mind but little that can be synthesized effectively enough for something bloggable. this could be a non-update save for the goals i shall enunciate after this colon :

1. [continued] creation of graphical representations of life’s great truths for inclusion in the bruin and on this site. sketched in moleskine are among life’s greatest equations (“tool factor as a function of car height,” “tool factor as a function of the rate of acceleration between known stop signs,” a smattering of relative hypocrisy and comparative logic graphs). they should be quickly understood, derisively funny, and altogether revealing.

2. resume work on gethighered.com. launch by start of school for high schoolers.

3. pwn the lsat.

4. write more. not sure how much is left in the “book” but i could see myself getting re-invigorated by it.

that’s all for now. g’nite.

“I’ve been a victim of
A selfish kinda love”

- Michael Jackson

whether i’ve wanted to or not, i’ve found myself thinking about michael jackson quite a bit lately. perhaps it is because he died in my backyard and the helicopters rattling the frames of windows we can’t open have made for an apt, if pained, metaphor for life’s ultimate flimsiness, but that seems a bit heavy handed.

before i switched to the self-torturing method of waking up to a vibrating cell-phone, my wake up playlist consisted of only one song, “thriller.” as a result, i hate the song. but it’s haunting, slow-boiling volume made it a credible alarm clock, and i would drag myself out of bed to turn off the maniacal laughter that rounds out the track. my favorite michael jackson song used to be “smooth criminal,” until a relative asked me to stop playing it because it reminded him/her of a prior sexual assault. i didn’t give that conversation any sort of critical interpretation – i didn’t say to myself, “wow, his music really affects people.” to do so might have been to undermine the “pop” tag his songs are labeled with.

pop music is essentially an upside down heart rate monitor. it generally travels along the surface, evoking feelings but not so much sentiments – you can dance to it, you can yell along with it, you can kelly clarkson with it. but occasionally, it dips farther into the consciousness of the listener. these dips define the good from the great in pop music. they are, perhaps, why people pass out at michael jackson concerts. michael’s dips run deep, punctuated with vocal irregularities, crotch-grabs, and razor sharp, within the beat dancing.

in “man in the mirror,” there is a pause at 2:51 that has always appealed to me. it’s the third or fourth time he’s sung the chorus already (if you like his choruses, you’re lucky because he usually sings them at least five times per song), but after saying “if you want to make the world a better place you have to look in the mirror and make a,” there is a loud silence followed by a euphoric, choral, exclaimed “CHANGE.” i don’t know that much about jackson’s music, but i’m usually more interested in the man behind it (thus my lack of extensive beatles’ musical knoweledge but fairly developed understanding of another icon, john lennon), and when you read about michael you get a sense that these screams and yells and vocal hiccups are not purely performative. there is a shining sort of honesty that lines his pseudo-feminine voice, and it only adds to what i find to be perhaps one of the most interesting figures of our american, cultural history.

to watch interviews with jackson is to feel confusion, repulsion, and compassion all at once. the very idea of jackson is confusing – a man whose face is as constructed as mickey rourke’s, whose skin color gradually faded from a rich chocolate to ipod headphone white is hardly easy to digest. there is a sense that, like the work of many artists, you are supposed to feel a repulsion, and by doing so, are forced to consider just why you feel repulsed (the extreme example, perhaps, is marilyn manson – his perversions are meant to force the consumer of his image to inspect the nature and cause of their repulsions). but watching his primetime live interviews with diane sawyer in 1995 (arguably among sawyer’s worst work: bumbling, apologetic, performatively harsh and ultimately lacking any journalistic integrity) elicits a sort of compassion that is most frustrating in nature. when she asks him if he has chosen to lighten his skin, you want to wring his neck for giving answers such as “it’s what nature wants, i love nature,” you want to tell diane that he has vitiligo, that his responses are cryptic because they are avoiding admitting physical imperfection because doing so would only ratify the abusive diatribes his father lambasted him with. you want to tell him to stop saying that he constructed his face because he is an “artist,” that “putting two eyes or a big red dot” on his face won’t hide him from public introspection, that the shock value won’t turn them away but only keep them hooked.

i don’t know whether the world truly lost something breathtaking with michael, and i’d feel a bit foolish saying he had much more to give (though the world certainly would have taken much more from him). he was frail, and the sum of his broken pieces was no longer less than his total self, the cracks were too wide. but for the observer, his death is cause for reflection. who was this man, and how did he work? do we forgive a man for his supposed sins for the popular culture blessings he bestowes upon the world? does death soften our view of those that some of us might have called wicked just years ago? does the man with the dui return from reckless, selfish mistake to father, brother, son, husband? does the criminal become man again in death? why is death so transformative? why is it hard to hate the dead?

maybe the ultimate test of one’s evilness is if it’s possible to hate you when you’re dead. hitler? evil. saddam hussein? probably evil. michael? not evil enough.

Michael Jackson, “Man in the Mirror”

Gotta make a change
For once in my life
It’s gonna feel real good
Gonna make a difference
Gonna make it right

As I turned up the collar on
A favorite winter coat
This wind is blowin’ my mind
I see the kids in the street
With not enough to eat
Who am I to be blind
Pretending not to see their needs

A summer’s disregard
A broken bottle top
And a one man’s soul
They follow each other
On the wind ya’ know
‘Cause they got nowhere to go
That’s why I want you to know

I’m starting with the man in the mirror
I’m asking him to change his ways
And no message could have been any clearer
If you wanna make the world a better place
Take a look at yourself and then make a change

I’ve been a victim of
A selfish kinda love
It’s time that I realize
There are some with no home
Not a nickel to loan
Could it be really pretending that they’re not alone

A willow deeply scarred
Somebody’s broken heart
And a washed out dream
(Washed out dream)
They follow the pattern of the wind ya’ see
‘Cause they got no place to be
That’s why I’m starting with me

I’m starting with the man in the mirror
I’m asking him to change his ways
And no message could have been any clearer
If you wanna make the world a better place
Take a look at yourself and then make a change

everytime i start writing a story my life falls apart.

This is all I’ve typed so far, more to come as the week progresses. Critiques appreciated. Are the characters dynamic? Does the voice come through? Is it ambiguous what the narrator knows / feels (I hope so)? UPDATED BELOW with parts III – V

Guy’s Life

I.

Guy’s body is growing old. Each day he wakes up, pours coarsely ground Italian roast into his one-cup French press, almost scalding himself as he pours the boiling water from the kettle over the grinds. ‘Just off the boil.’ What does that even mean?

He’s out the door now, heading on his Schwinn to the Los Angeles University Undergraduate Library. From 10:00 to 4:45 (the terms of his schedule – an hour later than the students and fifteen minutes less than even the insane boss – are a note of great pride fo Guy) he sits behind a slightly outdated white iMac and does as little as possible.

But as he maneuvers his mornings and days, his body grows increasingly fatigued. His wrist cracks audible as he tilts the morning’s whistling kettle. His back clenches as he leans over the bike, knees harmonizing with each jarring gearshift. I really need a car, each morning as he throws one hip over the ball-bashing seat.

So Guy – a symphony of discomforts at just 44 –sits at his white Mac and drifts from one manufacturer to another. Ford? Not what it used to be. Kia? Never buy Korean.

He has been pooling his library paychecks for 12 years now, and though his TV set him back, he is ready to pull the trigger.

But he can’t. Like a young man eyeing the object of his clandestine affection, he approaches the very idea of owning a with such a sense of intimidation that it is unclear if he will ever feel the ownership that a new automobile’s mere aroma imparts upon its proud driver.

The late 70’s Schwinn was not so bad. Biking was, after all, making quite a hipster return to LA’s streets. But its steel frame is too much for Guy. Last week, he was crossing Wilshire when a shiny black BMW decided it needed to make a right before Guy’s red rocket could pass (this happens in many places – Santa Monica’s behemoth parking lot exits become honker’s havens at the first sight of delay). Guy tried to turn to the right as the Bavarian beauty cut him off. The remaining forward momentum he had built up did not yield, and he was thrust into the car as the bike’s chain tore. The driver kept going on its busy path, leaving a humiliated and scratched Guy to hitch a ride from a Korean LAU student.

II.

Guy’s workday is uneventful. One day a law school student told him to “fuck off” because the DVD the student brought to view did not work on the library’s machines. Sometimes – quite often actually – Guy accidentally views pornography; the videos professors assign are either Shakespearian plays or arthouse explorations of the human psyche, and bare, natural breasts often figure in both. Academia’s obsession with the inappropriate amuses Guy. It reminds him of his sophomore year of high school’s English teacher, an especially WASPY man who named his son Finneagan but relished the opportunity to say “nigger” out loud because Mark Twain (also white) wrote the word in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

So the days pass. Four days ago Marge (The Manager) hired another undergraduate. Sophie, a third or fourth generation Salvadorian-American reeks of poverty. She, like so many of the cholas Guy bikes past at Los Angeles’s bus stops, wears clothes too small and talks too loudly into a phone too expensive for someone from her tax bracket. If she even pays taxes. Sophie is not fat, but she bears the sort of moderate unhealthiness in which a diet drenched in lard inevitably results.

Guy hates the undergraduates. The very fact that they fill the same role as he does in the world undermines his life’s worth. That they do so while texting girls they’ll sleep with during the afternoon hours, or that they come in hungover from parties that they go to on weeknights only adds to this anger. Guy was an undergraduate once too. He remembers what it was like to roll off an energetic girl, bodies still firm yet elastic. He remembers the sick pleasure of a hangover. Wanting to die, but already anticipating the next party.

But Sophie was different. Though she did talk to her cholo on all her breaks – Why the creepy diction? ‘Papi’ is not something you should call the man you’re sleeping with. – she was always on time, always polite with even the most nagging of clients. She was always reading. Her major was English, and Guy was pleasantly surprised by the lack of ethnic literature classes she took. Instead, Sophie read Brit lit, dabbled in American postmodernism. She read DeLillo, and when Guy mumbled his disgust with the author’s clunky prose, she agreed. Sophie, it seemed, was here to study.

Marge, the unbearable manager of their library section, was a stout woman. Round and rude, she was at all times difficult and seldom actually working. Despite his reluctance, Guy found himself in conversation with Sophie. Marge’s brutish demands and inescapable temper irked Sophie and Guy alike, and making fun of her brought them closer.

“She’s like Carrol’s Queen of Hearts,” Sophie would retort to Guy’s great amusement.

Sophie’s literary interests were also of great comfort to Guy – his Westwood apartment held few items more valuable to him than his books. Auster, Fitzgerald, Emerson, anthologies of British poetry. Guy took Milton’s ‘benefit of promiscuous reading’ to the extreme – novels, essays, Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Editions, all lumped together in the mind of one generally grumpy 44 year old.

The third year undergrad still annoyed Guy at times – men of his obstinacy rarely allow themselves to truly like anyone – but she was beginning to blend past his grumpiness, flashy phone, tight shirt, round belly and all.

III.

Guy’s search for a car is not completely fruitless. He makes countless trips to the BMW dealership on the smaller Santa Monica Boulevard, and though his public service salary prohibits him from purchasing the German imports, he likes the slick curves and sharp angles of the cars. The leather smells expensive, and feels luxurious. All leather burns the back of your legs. Not that the Schwinn doesn’t’ burn your ass either.

Over the course of these extremely Los Angeles trips to the dealership, Guy found Mortimer Fox.

Morty, also single and generally crabby, is the least successful car salesman at Benjamin Schwartz Fine Automobiles. Days go by, and Morty is lucky to sell three low end coupes. It is unclear, though, whether Morty’s regular failures indicate an incapability or a lack of desire. Over the course  about ten or twelve visits to the dealership, Guy has become sufficiently close to the man that he takes his breaks with him. They usually walk to Zinc – among the less overpriced boutique coffee shops that litter Beverly Hills. Last week, Morty talked too much.

“How’s work?” asked Guy. Guy opened every conversation in as risk-free a manner as possible.

“Complete shit. Yours?”

“Totally fecal.” (Among Guy’s more annoying habits is his penchant for playing synonym games with others who seldom know they are playing.) “How long since your last deal?”

Morty had shrugged in a manner that Guy now knows he should have noticed. It wasn’t a shrug defined by the rise of shoulders so much as the striking drop that followed. Morty’s shoulders seemed to fall below his chest.

“Three or four days, I don’t know.”

“Will they keep you much longer at this rate?” Guy was pressing too far, he knew, but something about Morty’s apathy towards his work nagged at him, egging him on.

“Doesn’t matter much, I’m fixing to leave anyway.”

“For what? To where?”

Morty looked at Guy, as though deciding whether or not this non-customer served any legitimate purpose in his life.

“I want to find my dad.”

Apparently – to Guy’s horror – he had passed the legitimacy test.

“What?” Guy’s question was dipped in remorse – he seldom enjoyed hearing other people’s stories, and Morty was more interesting as an accessory to a 6-series than a lost son.

“It just recently occurred to me that I haven’t spoken to my father in 35 years, and since I figure I was a weak conversationalist at 12, I should see if the scrub is around and tell him a few things.”

“But you were just a boy. What would you tell an old man you haven’t seen in 35 years?”

Morty’s eyes showed some energy for the first time since Guy met him.

“Lots,” he smirked.
IV.

Guy deposits his paychecks at the Wells Fargo branch in Westwood. Every fourteen days he bikes after work and pays a visit to his Personal Banking Specialist, Leah Topak. Leah, an indelibly sexy woman in her young thirties, affirms Guy’s every distaste for the shady business known as Direct Deposit. What good is a man if he doesn’t have a paycheck in his hand as he walks up to a fetching bank teller?

It would be a stretch to describe Guy and Leah’s relationship as anything but a one-sided catalogue of lingering stares. After all, Guy was in his mid forties and works in a library (not even a Special Collections Department) – beautiful women neither read nor need free public Wi-Fi, and as a result Guy holds none of the hope that emboldens a man to make an advance upon a captivating woman.

Today is that day of short-lived capitalistic glory – the second Friday of the month. Guy and Sophie check their boxes and each find an envelope with their respective names clawed in Marge’s maniacal script. In Guys there lies the ticket to Leah. In Sophie’s thinner envelope there is a piece of paper stamped “THIS IS NOT A CHECK” in big letters. Sophie invariably takes out her flashy phone, connects to her online banking, smacks her lips in approval, and berates her neo-luddite of a coworker.

“Look at you – you still have to go to the bank with that check. Me? I’m going to get some food.”

No shit. I’m sure Taco Bell appreciates your technological acumen.

But before she is able to leave for food, Sophie’s eyes swell with pain. She grabs Guy’s shirt just below his right armpit, steadying herself against the row of boxes with her other arm.

Shit. Here we go again.

“Sophie relax!” Guy barks and grabs her by the torso. Arms around her, he lowers her twitching body onto the ground, taking care to make sure her tongue is neither trapped between clenched teeth or being pulled over itself and into her throat. For the third time this year, Guy slams a syringe of the 125-milligram suspension of Phenytoin into her now resigning body. Come on fucker. Work. The medicine dampens the electrical conductance of brain cells, basically partially unplugging her runaway brain. The small syringes are worn in an inconspicuous pendant she wears around her neck. The needles and syringe fold out to full-size, in doing so breaking a crystal inside that allows the antiepileptic to flow to the needle.

Sophie is epileptic. And though Guy has arguably saved her life three times now, it still scares him to a stress level he seldom experiences. Marge has called 911 by now, and soon two paramedics will chauffer her plump El Salvadorian body to an overcrowded hospital for an afternoon’s observation.

When she is finally taken away, Guy goes home exhausted. He is almost forced to take stock of his own life, to consider its value in the face of near death.

But as he turns on the TV, a sour sensation comes over him.

I guess Leah will have to wait another day.

V.

Los Angeles gets it from everyone.

A few months ago, The New York Times covered the no cell-phone-while-driving bill in LA with a hackneyed vision for its readers:

“On any given day on a California freeway, it is not uncommon to see a young woman, phone cradled against one ear, carefully painting her nails a winsome shade of crimson, looking up now and then to inch her car forward in traffic.”

New York. So assured of its sophistication, Guy remembers thinking as he read the article. Too bad most of LA’s actors – icon of the city’s supposed cultural vapidity – live in New York. Most New Yorker female fans of ‘Sex and the City’ would call it “an escape from the city’s overwhelming gravity.” So Samantha can fuck a guy in a swing for a pair of Christian Leboutin heels, but the guys on ‘Entourage’ are ‘so-LA’ if they have pre-marital sex with supermodels.

When the article came out, it was Playboy that slapped the Times across the face with the rebuttal it posted on its blog (“Anyone want to bet that the reporter actually saw it? And saw it more than once? We’re giving odds.”). Not only did the lad mag damn the Grey Lady for her vitriol, but it demanded the paper consider its journalistic duties when regarding its west coast counterpart.

Guy doesn’t read Playboy though, so he didn’t know. He kept reading The Times – he finds its archaic formal devices endearing: “Mr. Obama”; “Mrs. Clinton”—the signifiers simultaneously connoted respect and a nostalgic yearning for the era of the newsie. False hopes.

That LA has blondes with plastic body parts is undeniable. But in the hills of Holmby Park, Bel Air, and Brentwood, live swarms of lawyers, doctors, journalists, photographers, writers, painters, tattoo artists, Democrats, Republicans, students, and scholars. In Westwood you’re almost hard-pressed to find a blonde – even the school’s sorority row is dominated by east Asians, Persians, and ethnic Jews.

Perhaps this imperiled nature of whiteness is what attracted Guy to Leah’s porcelain skin, hazel eyes, and chestnut hair. She seemed especially Anglo-Saxon in her typical attire: grey pants suit, blue Faconnable dress shirt, white and red name tag. Among the swarm of her Indian, Asian, and Middle-Eastern colleagues, she seemed a figure of Americana. She’s probably the only one that isn’t helping minorities cheat the bank, the government, the man.

Regardless of the race relations issues of Guy’s attraction to Leah Topak, the attraction seems very real. Before he sleeps, he pledges to include Wells Fargo in his Saturday morning plans.

“but what is art? it is the expression of thought, and it is best done without paying heed. in essence, half-assed art is the best. write with the heart and you will be amazed by your own power. draw without looking and your strength will overwhelm you. art is the impluse that is best uncovered by a lack of conscious effort.”

maybe i wrote that once.