And now for something completely different.

ZEITGEYSER.

Read all afternoon. Slept from 6pm-7. Read from 7-10. Stalled. Wrote from 11-3am, stumbled into bed. Couldn't sleep. Up again at 5:30. Finished the paper by 6:30, stumbled into bed. Couldn't sleep. Up again at 9:30 to print it and head to campus. I almost would have enjoyed it if it was a topic I cared about.

I keep having this very lucid dream about Captain Jack Sparrow having a cameo in the car chase scene of The Ring. I am almost starting to believe it's true, despite the fact that Captain Jack Sparrow didn't exist when The Ring was released and The Ring does not have a car chase scene.

Seen several other cars around town of the same make and model as mine. Some have Georgia flags, some have faded bumper stickers, but we all have the ragged mohawk of peeling paint and washed-away primer. We are quietly in league.

Why doesn't anyone ever sit next to me on the bus? No, seriously.

we can fly like a 747, baby

It is Thursday, my favorite day of the week. On Thursdays I have only one class, no work, no requirements-- half of a day that's entirely mine. Thursdays are the days I putter around doing all the menial tasks I don't get around to doing otherwise-- I go to the post office, do laundry, drop off the recycling, clean my room, try to write. It is also a lovely day for journal updates.

On Sunday Matt and I finally got around to painting my foyer (or "creating an accent wall," depending on how gay you want to be) with the paint I bought for the job at least six months ago. In pictures it looks greenish from the lighting or washed out from the sun. In person, though, it's perfect, thanks in no small part to Matt's wall-painting expertise.

I have to register for next semester's classes tomorrow and still need to make some decisions. More importantly, though, I have a paper due tomorrow on a book I wasn't able to track down until yesterday. I think I'll go read.

A total of four out of nine scheduled people showed up to work on this, my first night flying solo, which is why I'm sitting in the office chattering away here. Good lord, this journal entry is entirely vacuous. I'm two for two today!

Somehow the week is already just about over. Yesterday I was advised for next semester; now that I'm done with all my core I can focus on higher-level major classes. I do not know why I took three easy core classes this semester, because not only did it make this semester too easy but since I no longer have any core classes to pad my schedule with, my semesters from now on are going to be very intense. However, next semester there's going to be an upper-level English classes called The Shakespearean Matrix. The description is as follows:
"The course seeks to interrogate Harold Bloom's broad thesis in his recent book. Essentially, Bloom contends that Western consciousness, ideas of the individual, our cultural make-up, etc. are all defined in Shakespearean terms; to paraphrase, ``we live in a Shakespearean universe". We will start with The Matrix (a good analogy for Bloom's thesis) and then move on to a number of other (modern?) Shakespeare films - products of popular and material culture - to see to what extent Bloom's thesis holds. Obviously, the course will involve thinking about our own engagement with different Shakespearean texts (written and performed) within a theoretical framework involving (at least at the moment) ideas from Baudrillard (Simulacra and Simulation), Terry Eagleton (Ideology), Althusser (Interpellation), Greenblatt (cultural `self-fashioning'), and Holderness and Belsey (on Shakespeare film texts and their radical potential and lack thereof respectively).
It's worth a shot, right?

Since absolutely every other supervisor is unavailable, I'm going to have to cover the shift tonight. It's going to be my first time supervising alone; I didn't really get nervous at the premise until I started thinking about it this morning. Hopefully I can simply keep as few things as possible from going wrong.

Man, I need to stop updating in the morning. This sucks.

Last Sunday, October 12th, was the fifth anniversary of the murder of Matthew Shepard. The Bush Administration honored his death by declaring this Marriage Protection Week, dedicated to the fight to ban gay marriage. 2004, folks...

silence

I had the most amazing non-accident on Friday night. Cruising through town in the right lane around 45mph, a fat blue truck in the left lane that had halted to turn left decided abruptly to merge into the right lane instead, when I was about 20 feet away. I slammed the horn, slammed the brakes and swerved to the right (with tires squealing) directly into the very, very conveniently-placed entrance to a gas station. I could have sworn we knicked each other but when he followed me into the lot it turned out we both got lucky. After making sure everything was fine, he even asked weakly, "Do you need gas?" He looked scared out of his mind and I was glad we were both fine, mainly because I'd been speeding anyway. So far this and that little event on April 17, which never did amount to anything, have been my only real brushes with accidents despite the fact I drive like an idiot. Knock on wood.

Been knocking everything out of the park lately. Volleyball: not sucking. Bio midterm: A. Second Poly Sci exam: A. Oct. 6 paper: A. As for writing this update at 5am, well, I'm hoping my luck with morning paper-writing won't fail me now.

and we'll become sillhouettes when our bodies finally go

Bio midterm over with. At work tonight I and the other supervisors were listening to the campus radio station and (like everyone else it seems) they were talking about California's new governor. They asked for people to call in, so I did, and ended up chatting with them on air for about ten minutes. I don't remember everything I said but it probably had something to do with us being an international laughingstock and how grateful I am that he can't run for the presidency because he's foreign-born, though Matt says there's a movement right now to amend that. I also watched some of The Shipping News, saw Matt and got to pet not one but two of the neighborhood cats. Life is good when you can pet a cat.

whoops

It's getting harder and harder to ignore the fact that I don't belong at UGA, or in Georgia or the south in general. As a freshman the thought of being a stranger in a strange land was novel. Gradually (and naively) I convinced myself that I could change things to suit me, but that obviously can't and won't happen. Now, I'm keenly aware every day that I'm living in the midst of people who hold entirely different values than mine, who hold opinions I don't agree with and who cherish a way of life that seems completely foreign to me. UGA is focused on almost entirely on football, bar-hopping, SUVs, God and conservatism (in that order), and I have a pronounced disinterest in all of these things. When I came here I didn't know that UGA is also proud to be one of the biggest party schools in the nation, but I sure as hell learned it quickly. I'm glad I've been exposed to these things, because new experiences are the foundation of growth, and of course I'm not implying that my way of life is better than anyone else's, but there's nothing constructive about this almost complete alienation. Every day the little voice in the back of my head that asks, What are you doing here? is growing louder and louder, and I don't have an answer for it. What would it be like to live someplace that interests me and feels like home, and to be in a university surrounded by people I can relate to? I don't know, but I'd like to. All I know now is that if I stay here I'm going to be graduating for a university I don't respect with a degree I have no pride in. I'm too young to feel that hollow.

i'm part of you indefinitely

I got home from work last night at 9 and tinkered with the website and Underworld review for my upcoming little movie site, "Flick Off." I climbed into bed at 1:30am, turned out the light, got comfortable, drifted off, and then promptly remembered that I had a paper due in the morning. So up I got again at 5am to write it before catching the bus at 9. I don't think it's an awful paper, but I'm not in any real hurry to reread it just yet and check. I worked tonight and will also work tomorrow night despite the fact that my Bio midterm is on Wednesday and I've barely studied for it. Such is Mango.

Had a great weekend with Matt. Very little else worth mentioning. Loose ends abounding, but loose ends always abound. Life without loose ends is called death.