Infinity

Some days, you feel infinite. They are like unwrapping an unexpected present to find exactly what you need. The sun is high, the mountains tall and the air fresh. The humidity hangs visibly in the valley, letting the sun make playful shapes on the suspended droplets of water. The breeze kisses your face softly, like a favorite lover. Your lips curl up unconsciously. The ice in your glass plays the notes of a perfect melody, and you watch people cross the lawn.

There are those whose quick pace leaves them little time to wonder, but sinks you deeper into your perch. Those who amble slowly, their lives stretching out before them on the sidewalk. A couple, fingers intertwined, shares a laugh that can belong only to new love.

And all the while, the fabric of your world renders you invisible as you share laughter with the best people you have ever met. No one is perfect save when the day is infinite.

As the sun slips behind the trees, firelight makes new hollows on faces and new shapes on the ground, creating as it destroys.

On Emptiness.

Emptiness destroys. A black hole the size of a pin could consume the entire solar system. Human emptiness eats you up, your insides first, organ by organ, beginning with the heart. It leaves you an empty shell full of straw. Its as T.S. Eliot said,
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

There is a certain agony that lives inside the empty caverns of the heart, creating a home in the hollows that once housed a life full of promises for a happy tomorrow. Emptiness wakes you up in the middle of the night, gasping for air as it sucks you into the flood for which you are so wholly unprepared. The waters cause your limbs to fall numb, rendering you incabable of swimming, saving your own life.

Emptiness fnds litle solace in life’s usual comforts, food nor drink, nor the company of good friends. Instead, emptiness breeds more emptiness, bare walls, empty windows to souls and the dead eyes of one so wholly lost that there is not a map in creation to lead one from the caverns of the great maze.

The hollow men, those men full of straw and air, they are flammable. Just the slightest spark could be enough to ignite the emptiness. And, unlike wood, the fires of emptiness are infectious, drawing in the slightest breath of smoke can be enough to immobilize the person.

Emptiness is pervasive, nothing goes unouched.

Emptiness is not empty at all.

Emptiness is full of the most searing pain your soul can experience.

Not What I Want

I think I have some answers. They are definitely not the ones I want. In fact, these are some of the last things I want to be doing.

Procrastination Station

I’m on spring break right now, but I’m behind enough on my work that I’m forced to get some of it done. Therefore, I have compiled a list of things to do rather than my homework:

• Research meaningless things on Wikipedia (you don’t have to do your work but you don’t feel alltogether unproductive either–see example)
  • A typical day on Wikipedia:

    Begin search on a particular, rather general, topic (American Government, Shakespeare, periodic table of elements, etc).

    Move on to peripheral article (the US Senate, works of Shakespeare, individual elements).

    And so on (the composition of the US Senate in 1834, unpublished works of Shakespeare, the atomic structure of Carbon).

    And so forth (the composition of the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1721, the unpublished and unverified works of Shakespeare’s pet mongoose, the complete molecular breakdown of human feces).

    Until finally (the mating habits of the winged man-eating platypus of Timbuktu, strange and exciting facts about fungi, and the precise amount of wood that a woodchuck would chuck — that is, if a woodchuck *could* chuck wood).

• Take the dog on endless walks (he’s very happy about this)
• Log onto BBC and read the news…for the entire world
• Make any recipe that seems interesting and/or copy things off the Food Network
• Watch reruns of “The Golden Girls”on TV
• Vacuum the entire house
• Rearrange the living room. Several times. Then decide that things were better the way they were to begin with.
• Paint your nails. And toenails.
• Catch up on non-essential email
• Write your grandmother a letter
• Pay all those bills that aren’t due until the end of the month
• Use the internet to determine that the distance from Portland, OR to Raleigh, NC is equivalent to that from Baghdad, Iraq to Paris, France.
• Go through your entire refrigerator and make a grocery list divided by category

Ok, I’m out, I have to actually work on my paper now. Also, I’ve done most of these things by now.

Good Luck!

See, the real problem about being a senior in college is more than just praying that you’ll find a job in the next few months, its that suddenly, you have to have a clue what you’re doing in your life. For three years the farthest ahead you’ve had to think has been the following semester (choosing classes) and even that’s fix-able (drop/add period). But then, sometime in the middle of your last year of college (read: the last year you can do whatever the hell you want and still get away with it) you realize that you have no real skill set but what you do have is a mountain of bills hanging over your head that will be due soon and a complete inability to go into a job interview and not sound like an idiot…”Yes, I think I can definitely handle event planning for this company because once, I like planned a mixer for like my sorority and like no one got alcohol poisoning”.

But even more than that, you are suddenly confronted with the idea that you’ll have to find somewhere to live and someone to live with. And what if that’s really far away from everything else, or you decide to leave the country and risk ruining your relationship? These are things they failed to include in either your Freshman OR Senior Seminar classes. What the hell have they been teaching us anyway?

The thought that I might have to choose between what I see as my immediate goals and what I see as my immediate desires is not something I thought I would have to do right now. I wasn’t prepared for this in the least. On the up side, spending the last four years of my life being a slave to the paper tiger has taught me a few valuable lessons:

• No matter how convinced you are that your way is the right way, tell the professor what he/she wants to hear if you want to make it out alive.
• Showering AFTER class is totally an option.
• Parking tickets don’t mean anything unless the people writing them have guns.
• Professors will pretty much let you get away with murder if you actually show up to their classes and act interested.
• Quarters are more valuable than gold…gold doesn’t fit in the washing machine.
• “Dry clean only” can also be read as “Wash this in your semi-clean sink and hang in various places around your room/apartment”.
• If you’re technically not supposed to have pets, try and keep yours from making loud noises in the middle of the night.
• If ANYONE offers to let you do laundry at their house/eat a meal with them, take them up on it ASAP. You’re not being a mooch, you’re being friendly.
• If you miss an exam because you’re “sick”, try not to run into your professor at the bar/restaurant/mall later that day.
• Befriend the librarians. You may SEEM like a geek, but they’ll save your ass when you have a research paper due in 48 hours and absolutely no leads.
• And finally, and perhaps most importantly, Ramen IS a good meal (no matter what your mother/gym professor/coach says).

Unfortunately, none of these valuable life lessons is capable of helping me get a job/internship/place to live/ability to make good decisions. Hell, I’m not even sure any of these things would help me get into grad school. :)

An Address to the Golden Door

An address to the golden door
I was strumming on a stone again
Pulling teeth from the pimps of gore when hatched
A tragic opera in my mind…
And it told of a new design
In which every soul is duty bound
To uphold all the statues of boredom therein lies
The fatal flaw of the red age

Because it was nothing like we’d ever dremt
Our lust for life had gone away with the rent we hated
And because it made no money nobody saved no one’s life.

So we burned all our uniforms
And let nature take its course again
And the big ones just eat all the little ones
That sent us back to the drawing board.

In our darkest hours
We have all asked for some
Angel to come
Sprinkle his dust all around
But all our crying voices they can’t turn it around
And you’ve had some crazy conversations of your own.

We’ve got rules and maps and guns in our backs
But we still can’t just behave ourselves
Even if to save our own lives so, says I, WE ARE A BRUTAL KIND.

Cuz this is nothing like we’d ever dremt
Tell Sir Thomas More we’ve got another failed attempt
Cuz if it makes them money they might just give you life this time.

“So Says I” The Shins

Nothing Gets My Room Cleaner Than a Paper Due Tomorrow

I joined this Facebook group by that title, and its so true of me. I have a midterm in international economics due tomorrow. Which is why I’ve decided this this is obviously what I need to be doing. Mainly because I’ve decided that I really don’t give a crap about factor-endowment theory and comparative advantage and transportation costs. This is probably Senioritis or whatever, but I seriously can’t concentrate anymore. Thank God spring break starts tomorrow…ok, it actually starts the day after tomorrow but who’s counting?

P.S. Yes, my room is also abnormally clean…