I’m all for cubicle-to-cubicle conversation. It’s healthy; it keeps one sane in the midst of a cube-jungle corporate office. However, when you happen to sit between the verbal cubicles (whose occupants are not on your team), and when the conversation floating above your head turns for the third time to how incredibly “dreary” (“I just get the urge to walk in there and splash yellow paint all over the walls!”), and “gloomy” (“I just think of death the entire time i’m there!”) the local neighborhood funeral parlor is, at that point i think you should keep it in your own damn box. And it’s only 8:20 … not to mention that i don’t think they saw the subtle irony of me blasting “God” through their entire conversation to try to down them out.
Ahh… office life. A fuller treatise still forthcoming.
off-topics
Lindsay, who just read the entirety of my archives and so is in the position to know these things, has informed me that i just have to write more often. If i write more often, she reasons, i will enjoy it more, and enjoying it will make it better.
This, historically, has meant that you (the reader) has to suffer through all kinds of crapola in the meantime. But, you didn’t have anything else to do, right?
“You’re on hiatus, huh?” It seemed like a funny question to ask me — of course i’m not on hiatus. When am i ever? I’ve only ever took one that i recall. One look at the date on my last post told me why i was being asked, though. Apparently just thinking about witty stuff doesn’t count for much in the blogging game .
As if it’s a consolation for missing out on daily updates from my decidedly droll life, i have somehow managed to notch my fourth consecutive quarter on the Dean’s List. To put that in more tangible terms for all of you literal thinkers out there, i am currently less than .03 away from graduating with honors. Not the dopey kind of honors you get from being in the “honors college.” Noooo. The kind of honors you get for being smart and doing well.
In an intriguing turn of events, i don’t remember a lot of being smart or doing well that happened over the course of this past quarter. Thinking about it is like trying to remember if i’ve blogged lately — i know that i got straight A’s, but i’m a little foggy on the when and the how of it. There was, of course, last week’s two days of hell as i built a Senior thesis paper from the relative nothingness of one interesting Scientific American article into a hulking five thousand word treatise on Globalization and Technology. I got an A in that class… despite not being a Senior and, oh, not even being enrolled in the major that i wrote a thesis for. Ha. And, people in the class talked about how the professor was the second coming of Vlad the Impaler, a veritable vampire of academia, sucking up lots and lots of work and leaving behind only the dried up dead husks of things he once regarded as students.
He seemed to like me, actually.
I could go on. Somehow i’ve gotten to this place, this place where i am successful and smart and yet i feel like some small part of me is living outside of it, wondering how someone could be so successful. And smart. And so goddamn charming.
Okay, so, maybe i made that part up….
I’m having trouble deciding what i feel about anything except for sitting holed up in my room protected by womb of thick walls and loud music. Yesterday on my way home from class i walked a block out my way – out of boredom, i guess. I had never been on it on foot before, just in a car passing by. The feeling was indescribable, as if i had stepped off of my front porch and onto the set of a television show (because i had never seen that block before except for through the glass of a window/screen).
I think that sometimes Elise feels bad that i don’t write so many songs anymore, as if it’s her fault. It guess it is a little bit, because i am happy and not creating stupid scenarios in my head to connect me to every person that i pass by on the street out of utter desperation to be a part of someone else’s day. It’s confusing to look at the entries in my little grey book from a year ago, while Elise was still new and confusing enough to evoke my typical lyrical ramblings. At a point not too far after that there is a disconnect, and suddenly i am not writing out of my gut anymore, from where my songs used to spring covered in bile and blood. Every time Elise gets used to me not having anything new to sing at all i surprise her, the other night with four new songs that she had never even heard a hint of before. They make me uneasy — i have trouble feeling them and so they are hard to sing.
I have thirty four weeks of college left after i complete my last co-operative learning experience this summer. I said a funny thing last night to Erika about that. I said that i wasn’t returning my mother’s phone calls because she would have to get used to not hearing from me and being worried once i left Philadelphia. I talk a lot about what i may or may not do after i graduate, everything from going abroad to going to grad school, and usually it has an air of fantasy and speculation about it. Last night, though, i said it without thinking. It felt like singing one of my old songs, half diaphragmatic support and half a punch in the gut. I don’t know where i’m going to go, or what i’m going to do, but apparently it’s not going to be here.
Or so i say. But, for as many streets there are in this city that can make me feel alien there are other cities on this planet that i’ll never see. I really ought to start working on that.
Coolness
Meet Ariel Meadow Stallings. She is a blogger of some note and repute, but i really only know her as a commenter on Little Yellow Different. Apparently, she’s also an occasional contributor to the (now defunct?) Shift magazine, which i had never even heard of before today. Her latest contribution was an article about small-time blogger Helen-Jane, who was hired (yes, hired) to blog on the behalf of a movie starring real famous people!
How, you ask, did a little-known blogger get flown across the country to do such high-profile weblogging? Simple: star on Ernie Hsuing‘s reality-based Blind Date Blog this past year, which i ostensibly served as a color commenter on, along with Cyan Pictures president Josh Newman. That makes Helen and i both alum of the same fantastic blog empire! So, theoretically i connect to Helen-Jane here. However, let’s keep moving…
The movie, I Love Your Work, stars Christina Ricci, Vince Vaughn, Jason Lee, and Elvis Costello. The index page of its website, to my vague disbelief, is literally Helen-Jane’s daily log from the set (which is also covered in this Salon article). The move site provides a link to Helen’s personal webpage and there, in her top-left-sidebar box she highlights what she is currently “listening to.” And, what, you ask, is she listening to?
None other than Peter Mulvey, my personal favorite folk-rock hero and my mainstay musical influence — not to mention being one of the few people on earth who owns both of my demo cds as well as occasionally talking to me from on-stage about his bottom-end. So to speak.
The internet: a small damn world afterall.
Man, blogger eats one witty post and i’m dead in the water for over a week. If it makes you feel any better, it wasn’t too witty… just something about Friends, urination, and Ghandi. I mean, honestly, whatever you just imagined the post to be was probably just as funny as the erstwhile real thing.
This weekend i worked an event called Scholars Days, which are the point in the admissions process when the middling-to-exceptionally smart applicants get dressed up in order to impress the faculty members who will contribute to deciding how big each scholarship will be. Exciting stuff. I remember when i came to campus for my interview i was completely miserable, soaking wet, and skeptical that i would even pass by Drexel’s campus on the street again let alone attend. So, i find working this event to be implicitly ironic.
In case you were wondering, student employees are all but invisible on Scholar’s Days. Students are either too miserable or too nervous to want to talk to us, and parents are either too overwhelmed or too well-trained as stage-mothers to listen to our incredibly valid opinions about the campus. As a result, i basically spent ten hours of my (well-paid) life alternately reading and crowd-watching.
My favorite iteration of the latter is definitely making up stories about all of the students i catch a glimpse of. This activity keeps me blithely entertained and also allows me the illusion of attentiveness. The Gimme Round tends to involve identifying the chronic pot smokers and the never-been-kissed crowd; not especially challenging. Next i move on to identifying those who have competed in science fairs, guessing at what their project was for bonus point. Afterwards, if it’s not a liberal arts day, i play “Trekkie or Comic Book Fan?” Even more tricky is trying to decide who is questioning their sexuality, closely followed by who is definitely not questioning their sexuality (though maybe they should be). And, finally, in what i like to think of as the lightening round, i contemplate who will join the theatre (we tend to be rather intelligent, on the whole) and, subsequently, who will spend their first cast party sucking face with one of the cast members of our current play How To Save The World (or The Play Big Business Doesn’t Want You To See).
If only i could get together a panel of my peers and a tiny buzzer i think Scholars Days would go by much faster. As it was i had to convince Aim to have a Corona and some wings with me afterwards to salvage the weekend at all.