Compulsion

Just now I found myself doing something so frighteningly compulsive, I had to jot it down. I was setting three alarms for tomorrow morning. It's late now, and i'll only get around 3 hours of sleep, and so i'm setting three consecutive alarms with a snooze time of ten minutes. I set the first alarm for 6:45am, the second alarm I set 11 minutes later, and the third I set 12 minutes later than the second alarm. All of this is part of the daily routine; nothing out of the ordinary.

Earlier, however, I called my parents to talk about Rafael Nadal's straight set victory over his countryman, and though I couldn't get them on the horn, I received texted messages as to my whereabouts and well-being shortly thereafter. My parents are concerned. So basically, I was calling about tennis, and my parents thought I was dying or something. They should know better, but also I suppose they shouldn't. So before i set my alarms, I texted my mother to inform her that i was fine, to which she replied, "great luv u get some rest". So now, for every alarm that I set, i repeat in my head "get some rest". Three times I repeat this, so blind in my idiosyncrasy that I believe that there is a nice little feature on my alarm clock (my phone) that suggests, strongly, maternally, that I ought to rest-up. I reset my alarms just to check.

Media Culture & Twenty-Somethings

... Smashing through the room of his youth, and casting down his cloak and sword he reached bear handed into the blackness of his past and smote the fears of old in ruin upon the earth...

How do we move away from our understanding of the world? We do not, I suppose. We have tried and we have failed. The foundations of understanding are necessarily under pressure. How do we think about the world that we are born into? Can you end a sentence with a preposition? If it's a question, yes (maybe). What is everyone looking for?

I feel saturated by media. I love movies. I love tv, and books, and music. I guess the best of all of these, the one's that resonate are the ones that reflect our lives. Carolann showed American Tune, by Paul Simon and it made me cry. How can something so simple do that. The ability to express a feeling so precisely that it seems to cut through you. The feeling of missing home, or the feeling of pride, or of love. All of the things wracked up in a lifetime. What compass do we have to navigate these experiences? I've always thought it was the people that occupy it. What if we are alone? Those relationships become meaningless, or meaningful and fleating, or both or who cares. I need to figure out what to do with my life. How I should go about the years that I have. I'm 25 years old and I have nothing to say about the world. Still, tomorrow's going to be another working day and I'm trying to get some rest.

The Blog Dilemma

My refrigerator is dying a slow death. Walking back to my room, having just emptied and refilled the Brita Filter (a skill which I alone seem to possess) I can still hear my refrigerator moaning and tumbling like a full washing machine. In my room, sucking on a Calms Forte, a homeopathic remedy for stress and passive worrying, and which, by nature excels at calming, I can still hear the damn thing. Every few minutes the motor works up enough momentum to rock the whole apartment. Though i'm not hungry (feeling not so great after a nice tasting but cold tuna melt from a local diner) every sway of my room compels me towards the fridge. At this very moment there is a nicely cooked cut of chicken, deciding whether or not to go bad. "Stay alive," I say, "I will find you!" I should go check on it.

The chicken is fine and I am in the kitchen now. The pull of the whining refrigerator was enough to rip any man with a soul out of the confines of his room. Besides, writing is an energetic process that should be done in a seated position not lying on one's back in bed. The kitchen table will work much better from here on out. The bed is a place of much more pleasurable and necessary endeavors than writing, and it is best not to confuse the lot. Additionally, this allows me access to the refrigerator. My presence, I think, is soothing to it. The tuna melt, which had such severe consequences earlier seems to have been mollified by the pathetic sputtering of its keeper. All in all this seems a far superior place for writing. This brings me to a point.

There are commitments that must be made when taking on a month-long-daily-blog-posting marathon. Some of these commitments are more obvious than other, though all of them, obvious or not, are necessary in the making of a successful enterprise. The most obvious of these commitments are the allotment of time and thought. Time is, for this blogger, of the essence. At least one hour per post for writing and revising (maybe only thirty minutes if the Hills is on). Second, thought is equally as important, albeit a bit more passive and persistent than it's brethren. Both time and thought are necessary components of blogging, things which when faced with the prospect of posting something every day of this month I assented to freely. The unseen commitments, which i unknowingly agreed to with my subscription, include some of my favorite things. Drinking, for one, almost certainly rules out blogging for that day, and in some special cases for the next day as well. Sex, also, overrules the prospect of blogging and rightfully so. Weekends and free time, too, have started to infringe on my blog time. This all sounds backwards, I know, but that is the commitment of the full-time blog champion; no booze, no sex, significantly less free time. So get out there bloggers, and write your sober, lonely, celibate memoirs.