teen drinking is very bad. yo, I got a fake ID, though!

[intertribal]

I'm officially pulling for Fabio in Top Chef. I'm sure plenty of people like Fabio, but I've never been good at picking original favorite "characters". This is something I realized back in middle school. But his words tonight won me over: "It's called Top Chef, not Top... Scallops!"

Check out my new poster. It is more awesome than I could have ever hoped for. I wanted to get a seniors only poster but I didn't know if those were even made. And the UNL bookstore does not, uh, sell football posters? And the 2008 Offense and 2008 Defense ones are lame-o collages. But then Carol, who works with my mother, came to my rescue and gave me this one off the wall in Graduate Studies, the last of its kind. And now it is mine! As are they! Forever!

I just love having connections within the university. 

I totally redecorated my room over break. Got rid of the old computer, got rid of a lot of old junk, recycled a bunch too because I'm such a good girl who loves the fucking Earth. I'm afraid the lifespan of our notes came to an end, Lindsey - hope that's ok, but I at least was frighteningly stupid back then. Also bought a nice chair for cheap, lugged it back across town barely attached to the trunk of the car... good times. Haven't redone the closet but I don't think that's going to happen for a while. Some old pictures and postcards I bought in Surabaya are now in frames, but I don't know where to put them because for a while there I was going to buy a whole new slew of posters. Except there are no posters of any worth in the entire city of Lincoln. Rage. I'll probably hang them over my bed. The slot by the television where I look most of the day has been claimed by the Huskers.

Sorry, Surabaya.

My mother and I had to have a "conversation" today over dinner. About my future. Good thing I had a pina colada to distract me. I hate those fucking conversations. Ironically, because I'm a fucking good girl, I have a plan, unlike many people my age. Take break at home. Join Peace Corps. Go to grad school for two years. Start trying really hard to join the Foreign Service. Ta-da. And I think I'm having "plan anxiety". I get this from time to time. Because sometimes I wonder if this plan is what I really, truly want. Would it work? Probably, yes. I'm sure I'd have good days. But is it what I really want.  I feel like my whole life has been so fucking planned that I'm not actually living. I'm following a plan. I guess sixteen years of straight school will do that to you.

On the other hand, the guy I had a complicated relationship with in high school, renowned for his complete lack of planning or ambition (I think I was feeling so over-planned then that that was what attracted me to him - when I realized he had no future whatsoever I went right back into crazy planning again), is now apparently homeless in California. Good Christ. I want a happy medium.

Whatever, I'll just delay thinking about that and watch Adult Swim. Turns out I like the new show Superjail! So much blood. Have I mentioned that I think I like The Venture Bros. way more than anyone else on the planet, except the creators? Byron Orpheus is one of the more amazing characters I've run across.  Like, I seriously. Seriously. Like this show:

"Yeah failure, that's what Venture Bros. is all about. Beautiful sublime failure." —Doc Hammer

"It shows that failure's funny, and it's beautiful and it's life, and it's okay, and it's all we can write because we are big fucking failures." —Doc Hammer

Comments

Re: to correct html

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

it reminded me of something I read by Kafka. I don't know. Like it sounded like something Kafka would say.

To put it precisely, what I was going to reply to the comment when you said that he killed himself was "well, so did Kafka" - except Kafka's suicide was more passive.

Re: to correct html

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

yeah, i got that. i was saying that your saying he sounded like kafka made me more inclined to read his books.

hahaha. yeah, i read the bit about hanging and was like, "whoah, hardcore." which is probably not what my reaction to suicides should be, but whatever.

Re: to correct html

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

sorry, I didn't quite get your comment, I guess, but I get it now. ha ha, yeah. I haven't actually read that much Kafka and should read more, but I just feel like I understand where he's coming from with a lot of things. Like this quote: "I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? ...we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us."

meh, it is hardcore, you're right.

Re: to correct html

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

Is that a Kafka quote? I think Wallace used the "frozen sea" thing...oh, lol, it was part of the same quote. "It's not for nothing that Kafka spoke of literature as 'a hatchet with which we chop at the frozen seas inside us.'"

I actually did buy his book when I went shopping for xmas (hah) presents today. I mean, he wrote more than one book, but this is kinda THE book. It's like 1000+ pages. I thought about giving it to my dad, like surprise!, but I thought he might not like it, plus the father-son issues might send the wrong message. But it was rather captivating, so I didn't put it back either. Started out kinda like "The Metamorphosis," so...yeah, you're right about the Kafka influence. I forgot his name, though, except "David" + 6 syllables (no good) so I had to go up to the store clerk and actually ask if he knew an author who hanged himself last year. He may have hated me. Being neurotic, I thought maybe if I bought gift wrap too he would hate me less. It worries me that Dave Eggers likes him, because I don't really like Dave Eggers, but well, maybe he's just like Eggers's idol, and Eggers is the pretentious wannabe. I don't know. I am so rambling. Also a cat jumped on my shoulders in a store. But I will send you things now!

Re: to correct html

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

Yeah, man, Kafka was all about the frozen sea inside. Sigh. Reminds me of the Coldplay quote I was always writing on my hand in high school, "I know I'm dead on the surface but I am screaming underneath."

Oh my God, that would have been hilarious to give that to your father. HILARIOUS. Lol about the cat. And looking forward to it! Although you really need not do anything.

Who's Dave Eggers? Oh, never mind. Yeah. Kill me. I hate that kind of shit. Not that I've read anything by him, his Wikipedia article just looks annoying.

Re: to correct html

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

Hm. I really love Kafka, but I don't know his well-known quotes or anything. Just stories. I led conference on "The Hunger Artist," and I think it was the only conference that I actually progressed. Most of the time I just wanted to kill people for reading things so fucking literally (on "The Metamorphosis": "Why doesn't he just leave?"), and through the eyes of the characters (like when this neurotic mother in Woolf's book is worrying that their summer beach house is too old and shabby, and the children are tracking dirt and water in or whatever, and the windows should really be shut, and blah blah blah, there was someone who really took it to mean that this was a poor, decrepit, old shack, not that the character was a neurotic housewife), and never anything else. God.

Why hilarious to give it to my father? Entertainment? Father-son? Too many pages? Yeah, I went into a cat store (I mean, store with stuff for cats), and they had two cats in the shop, and I started petting one, and it just climbed on me, and it took me awhile to get it off. Then it followed me around the store (but in front of me. It followed me in front of me.), tried climbing on me again, and got stuck to my coat. Anyway, I just went and sent the package, so you will get it later this week, I should think.

Hahaha. What kind of shit? Shit with metrically good but vacuous titles?

Re: to correct html

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

I ♥ "The Hunger Artist". That might be a weird thing to say about Kafka in general, but oh well. Yeah, Kafka you either get, or you don't. I read it in a Short Story class so you can imagine. That's the one where my professor later killed himself.

I don't know, entertainment I guess? It just seems so very dark. I get how cats can follow you in front of you, that's what they do.

Yes, exactly, shit with metrically good but vacuous titles. Just exactly. Metrically good but vacuous everything, in fact. :P

Re: to correct html

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

I feel like there are multiple things to 'get' in Kafka, like that essay where Wallace brings out his 'jokes', yet says he has to backtrack and be like, no, it's not all a joke. I felt like I just picked out one aspect to talk about when I led conference. God, what is it with teaching Kafka and people killing themselves?

Dark...but comedic. Yeah, I dunno.

Hahaha. He does try to reach something a bit more universal than his own life in the book, I'm sure, but....he's just such a hipster. Or, I guess he's the generation before hipsters, but so taken with his own coolness, yet neurotically self-aware of it, likes obscure music, hates the Man, but is really much more conventional than he could possibly realize...

Re: to correct html

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

God, I just read Eggers' ESPN column. He has no business writing about sports. He sounds like Garrison fucking Keillor.

I know that sports aren't life (duh?), but this is not how you end a sports column in ESPN the Magazine: "Like The Magazine, and the good people who work there, they took the game seriously, seriously enough to fly in from Urbana-Champaign or Lisle or Oak Park or Downers Grove. But not so seriously as to confuse it with, say, life... The clouds were pink, the air was warm. We ate more soft pretzels."

Fail, man. Fail.

Re: to correct html

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

Hahaha. Yeah, that's pretty bad. At first I sorta liked him (though not writing about sports), but it got tiring very quickly. He's just kinda...self-absorbed. I think Keri actually met him and asserted he was just as self-absorbed in person.

He wrote the foreword for Wallace's book. But I think the biggest problem here is simply that he's not really a sports fan:

"There were times, reading a very exhaustive account of a tennis match, say, when I thought, well, okay. I like tennis as much as the next guy, but enough already."

Lol. He basically says he was hired to write the foreword to try to convince people that they could read a thousand-page book. But I learned things, I guess, that "He was once a nationally ranked tennis player," and he's from the Midwest. Wallace was, I mean.

Re: to correct html

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

No kidding man. Not a sports fan. Blah.

Re: to correct html

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

My opinion of Eggers falls steadily downward...

Re: to correct html

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

It's funny that he can be so self-absorbed while going around 'doing good in the world'. ...but why would you write novels about it? Maybe if I'd finished his memoir I would know.

Re: to correct html

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately I think a lot of people are like that. Like people we go to school with, you know.

Re: to correct html

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

true. i just don't get it.

Re: to correct html

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

That, and I do think he's less talented...I mean, I can't imagine him ever writing a sentence like, "The Dean at left, a lean yellowish man whose fixed smile nevertheless has the impermanent quality of something stamped into uncooperative material, is a personality-type I've come lately to appreciate, the type who delays need of any response from me be relating my side of the story for me, to me."

Re: to correct html

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

or rather, david + 4 syllables = 6 syllables. thought-->word mismatch there....