I am fixated on the idea of college.

We live in a tiny enclosed community until we graduate, then we set out in all directions for college, imagining that we are exhibiting some kind of agency, some autonomy over the volatile variation of life, but in reality we're just throwing ourselves upon the mercy of a vast, multifarious machine. College happens to us, like a gigantic wrecking ball crashing into a building, and the only agency we have is the right to pick up the pieces when what we've built is inevitably destroyed.

I know that this right is more than most have, but this constant destruction and reinvention is painful to experience and to watch.

Some of us get lost and never find ourselves again. Some of us find a cause, something greater to be a part of. Some of us put on masks that we never remove again for the rest of our lives. Some of us find love, and some of us grow to hate it. Some of us discover dreams, and even fewer of us find the courage to pursue it.

We, young, bright-eyed, and hopeful, mortgage our lives to gamble on the future, and the investment doesn't always pay off.

Sorry. I am an unrealistic person with an overactive consciousness who sometimes drinks too much coffee.

ANYWAYS, time to study.

brain dump

I really suck at ordering drinks at coffee shops, even though I study there most of the time. I typically end up ordering something that's not even on the menu and getting a weirded out look from the barista. I'm very confused by the menus, the various names for the sizes, and what things I can get iced or not. Tall equals medium equals venti equals small equals large equals what? They need more pictures on the menu - pictures of the drinks, not hands sinking into bags of coffee beans and shit like that. Also, I don't like to order lattes because let's face it, that's some foo foo shit, and I don't know what any of that other crap is. I just want espresso, milk, and mocha in a certain proportion, what's the name for that?

Hope is a dangerous, even psychotic emotion that can take over your life.

I live with 2 black guys and a philipino, and as a result I am now more racist than I ever have been, because well, it's funny.

If melancholy was a drink, it would be some kind of very strong, sweet wine that I can't talk about here because I don't know anything about wine or alcohol in general. What a failure of a thought, haha.

Sometimes I'm really mad/sad that I won't ever get the opportunity to be one of those ignorant americans studying abroad in europe and taking obnoxious pictures in front of landmarks and such.

heeeeyyy, 'white men can't jump' is on!

Jeff Tweedy from Wilco is the only person in the world that really understands me right now.

back to studying.
In retrospect, I didn't realize the magnitude of the decision I made to leave Tennessee and move to Los Angeles. I traded an incredible, diverse group of friends that I respected and who appreciated me for a complete unknown. I figured I would keep in touch with the people that mattered to me, but it's not that simple. You can call, you can write, you can savor brief moments in the margins of your lives, but it doesn't matter. Your paths diverge. Life churns on and the distance grows.

Fast friends fading, opportunities forgotten, years disappearing. You don't really notice a lot of the tragedy in life, but it's always hovering in the periphery.

Notetaking FAIL

I'm sitting next to this guy in history of economic thought this morning. He sleeps the whole time, except for waking up briefly to write the words 'the fall of rome' then goes back to sleep. At the end of class he awakes and frantically copies a graph from the slide that we didn't actually talk about. So his notes for the day read 'the fall of rome' and some completely irrelevant graph that he doesn't even know the meaning of.

Dell D400 sequence of events.

July 25th, 2009: The memory and the harddrive on my dell d400 simultaneously fail, taking months of research notes and 3 pages of my rough draft with it. I install a backup harddrive, replace the memory, dry my tears of rage and soldier on.

August 30th, 2009: The memory and the harddrive fail again, taking 8 pages of the final draft of my research paper. I stop just short of cleaving the entire thing in half with an axe. My dad arrives to visit, bringing a replacement computer, which ironically is another d400.

September 30th, 2009: Dell d400 powercord begins to fail, charging the battery only after several minutes of jimmying the cord in various directions.

HRRROUGGGGGGAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUUGHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

but anyway. The workload this quarter is ridiculous. But I like my classes - they have so much variety. This morning I had Physics m155, energy and modern economy, taught by Michael E Kahn, one of my favorite professors and a world renowned natural resource economist, and Michael Jura, a physics professor. They alternate teaching on tuesdays and thursdays, and Jura taught today. This meant that I looked down for a second to check a text message, and then looked up to find that we had fully diagrammed and calculated the energy flux between the earth and the sun and moved on to climate change. Kahn teaches energy economics on tuesdays, which is also awesome but in a way that I can actually understand.

Time to get to work.