wall
1.30.2009
11.06.2007
triforce
i realize that i'm about to take a probability test when i know very little. the differences between understanding, comprehension and performance have been making themselves clear to me in recent weeks.
we keep collecting pieces as we go, but don't really know what we're making.
9.03.2007
on and on
...hello? anyone still here?
i'm still alive. i don't really have anything to write, though. blogs are strange to me now.
in general, i'm confused.
yrs,
mb.
3.25.2007
a trip up north
A couple of weeks ago, Jen challenged me to come up with a destination for a weekend outing. One thing about new england is the compactness makes for perfect daylong roadtrips. I tossed around Providence and Montreal, but finally settled on Portland, Maine, mostly due to its seeming embodiment of everything quaint. When I told Jen, she was excited so we hopped in a car at 10am and headed north.
Basically, we kept to one part of Portland, the docks. Up a block or two from the docks is a little cobblestone downtown with a ton of restaurants and shops. One of my favorite pastimes is strolling through cities, especially ones that are new to me. The way some people relax in nature is how I relax on a city sidewalk.
I'm not sure what I expected from the locals in Portland, or Maine more generally, but it turns out that there are a bunch of hippies living up there. Supernice people with laidback attitudes, completely willing to help us out when we had questions.
Had me some sarsaparilla for the first time. It's really awesome if you can get your hands on a bottle. Like rootbeer, but better somehow. We also brought home live lobsters, which was one of the best meals I've had in a long while. In addition to great food, it was just nice to get out the dregs of school and work for a day. Just completely forget all my obligations and relax with some friends. I need to do that more often, I think.
Labels: road trip
2.04.2007
1.29.2007
finishing/beginning
The start and end are always the most exciting part of a project, for me. But, clearly, the more rewarding of the two is the end. I feel pretty great anytime I can successfully accomplish a goal I've set up for myself.
So, today I should, by all accounts, feel pretty great considering I finished what is probably the longest book I've read cover-to-cover, Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (it clocks in at 1000+ pgs). I read some of it on a fairly terrible cruise and then added a few pages here or there, mostly here in my bed shortly before falling asleep. I figured I would never finish it since free reading time seemed nonexistent due to grad schoolish-type concerns (this could be a myth/rationalization) and the plot seemed a little, well, missing in the first 200 or so pages.
When term ended, though, I decided I was going to finish it. And I did. I read the last 750 pages in about a month. And I loved doing it. I've never really experienced a book that compelled me so strongly to reread parts. It also struck this balance of being incredibly entertaining while delving into deeper issues of the value of entertainment, irony/cynicism and emotion. I was seriously tempted to start reading it again right after I finished it, but I decided to cool my jets a bit.
Walking home from Diesel, where I finished it, I got one of those existential twitches that taps directly into your self and shakes you for a bit. One of those "I don't think my heart is really in this" kind of thoughts about grad school/academia. Even more frightening was the realization that I'm pretty scared of depth in any field, really. The apparent finality of choosing a life path and all that. Fortunately (I guess), I'm seeing this same twitch all around me, in a lot of my friends. When I explain it to older folks, they seem to identify as well. It's nice to know that while the experience itself might be deeply lonely, I am not alone in experiencing it. It's strangely comforting to stumble upon these, sometimes painful or difficult, ways we are really very similar social beings.
12.29.2006
photobooths
my dream of being a photographer gets reilluminated every so often, usually when two things occur: toying with my dad's camera and/or browsing through some photos by people better than me.
also, i really want to get to lacma and the griffith observatory while i'm in the area. so far, this break is very different than i had imagined it. in fact, much of my life in the last month or so is very different than i imagined it. go figure.