paper was due three hours ago and all I want to do is ebay michael kors boots. what is WRONG with me??

the sweet pulp of life

my boyfriend, after we laughed for about four minutes on the phone: "Fuckin' A! You're one of a kind, V.V., you know that? There's nobody like you. I mean most people is basically the same, but you, you're definitely one of a kind."

could it feel better?

Starting to question why I spend two days a week at this job. Is this going anywhere? Has anyone even noticed my work? What if the whole paper folds?

I guess I'm realizing that in the big picture, all my jobs and internships haven't really gotten me anywhere. I've worked more than one job every summer since I was 13 and I have nothing to show for it. Just the dents in my friendships.

I think my generation is really, really bad at getting careers. Look how often we do stuff for free! And we haven't figured out how to get money out of the internet yet, either. We're too nervous and take too much prescriptive advice. Have to be sharper and more entrepreneurial if this is going to work.

Luckily I come from a line of hustlers going back four generations...

guess what?

My last Faster Times article (which is also my worst, but whatever) is up to #4 on the "most read" list! That's never happened to me before.

I've also never been on time for Kant before. A morning of records?

little things

- dreams of breaking every fucking button on the Rock Band kit of my next-door neighbor because SERIOUSLY. At LEAST pick something other than "Living on a Prayer." And Journey. PLEASE. Also his amp because NO ONE needs that much distortion to play 1-4-5 songs and fuck up the minor scales. UGH.
- successfully cold to my RA today at Hungarian. It felt great. I'm not the grudge-bearing type, but seriously, how much more of a goody-goody could she be? She fucking works at Better Homes and Gardens. (I thought I might be overreacting, but when I told S the story, he was all "That cunty little shit!" and I felt better about my ire.) Anyway it was like ice. I think I freaked out the people sharing my table though
- watched two movies last night, doing this being-sick thing properly now
- everyone is leaving next semester! What am I going to do?
- freaked out by the fact that Michael on Thirtysomething, whom I'm immensely attracted to, is roughly the age and size and shape of my father. He's also an ad man, and I get the sense that my dad thinks his life's story has followed Michael's character arch. Michael is so different, though, so edgy and above his wife's deluded shit — still, some part of me thinks I should stop watching, just
- had a smoke today and actually regretted it
- no clearer on this relationship, starting to wonder if I'll ever be sure of it, and if I can live with that
- hate my list-making instincts
- missed Fran's pre-screening and people have been saying nice things to me about the film all day. It's really touching, actually. Still haven't seen it, but I'm going to the real screening in a couple of weeks. Joey: "I think it says incredible things about you that you haven't seen your own movie yet." Me: "I was sick! And anyway I was busy cuddling and watching Metropolitan over falafel." Joey: "That's my point, honey." Joey of my heart! What will I do without him?
- really cool watching Renata go through the Core
- starting to think about what's going to happen to all these friendships that mean so much to me now. I've always been the don't -look-back type, a bridge burner. But I've also never had friendships like these. This is love, and I have no doubts, and I know I'll always want to know these people. Then again, I've let love leave me before. Makes me feel very alone facing the future.

I love my life

...although I'm really not looking forward to seeing the film. I don't like seeing myself, you know? I already know I'm not an actress. I have no delusions. I don't have to watch myself fall on my face to figure it out.

It would be fun to see everyone again, though.

oh man

I am SO FUCKED for this paper. And I already got an extension. Can't fall asleep but can't think straight to get any real work done. How do I let these things happen??

on the bright side, the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy is the coolest book I've ever owned
and my room is a mess and I don't even care
and S was real sweet on the phone just now, can't get over how he calls me "baby" (me: "Why don't you call me at half-time?" him: "That's football, baby")
and at least I know Renata's up too
and not doing her shit either
and I have office hours with professor Lilla tomorrow and I'm totally unprepared
and I already know I'll be unprepared for Poetry tomorrow too
and at least Lilla's class is cancelled on Friday, so I get to sleep in and maybe get blintzes with S
and I have no idea what's tying this list together
and actually things are pretty good. Feel smart again, although I have no good reason to. But still.

me and those Italian men...

Deciding whether to watch Thirtysomething when I can't get out of bed is really just deciding whether Hope is more annoying than Michael is hot. Michael always wins. He's just... UNGH.

also

finally introduced my folks to my boyfriend last weekend. Drank a few glasses of wine and got thoroughly trashed, basically leaving him to fend for himself. My mom: "V, what is that class you're taking on some obscure philosopher?" Me: "You mean Kant?" Mom: "Maybe. I don't know. Who's he?" My dad: "So, Veronica, you've taken a bunch of classes. How would you define Aesthetics?" My mom: "Do you know this man Mark Leela?" My dad: "So where would I start if I wanted to listen to the first tonal music?" My mom: "We took V to see Patti Smith when she was thirteen and we've been regretting it ever since." My dad: "Packers are playing tonight." And my sister just sat there laughing at me.

Actually, I think it went pretty well.

annoying

Spent the whole weekend with S. As I write this I'm wearing his pijamas lying in his bed while he's uptown working. (Me: "Do I have time to take a shower?" S: "You have time to send an email saying you're too sick to go to your unpaid internship in Park Slope. Do me a favor, V.V., take care of yourself.") Everything is soft and warm and it feels like being held. He even texted me from Columbus Circle to urge me to watch The Sopranos on the sofa. My head is spinning and it sounds like the best idea in the world.

But I can't do it, because I actually have to start my second Kant paper, which is due tomorrow. FUCK.

I do love him.

ever notice that I only blog at length when I'm supposed to be working?

Another tuesday morning at Tea Lounge and I keep questioning what I'm doing with my life. I'm turning into the tired stereotype of an advice columnist who has no idea how to make her own pressing decisions. Mostly I'm worried about what to do after college.

I used to be so sure that I wanted to go to grad school. It was easy to be sure because my love for my classes was its own argument. Grad school, I thought, would solve all my problems: by keeping me stimulated, it'd ensure that I wouldn't slip back into depression; by keeping me interested, it'd fend off mental atrophy and even insanity. (I'm aware that I walk around with some pretty bizarre phobias on a daily basis. More on this later.) I'd keep writing, maybe finish a book before I got my PhD. I'd have the kind of amazing absolutely-in-love no-room-for-doubt friendships that I treasure so much now. I'd become incredibly well-read and I'd travel the world and everything would be great. I'd be broke but I'd have everything that mattered to me, so I wouldn't care.

There are a few foreseeable problems with this plan. The first is that eventually I'll want to have kids. The timing just doesn't work out too well with grad school and the biological clock. Even if I finished by 28, I'd have to get a tenure-track job pretty much right away to be able to even afford children. And it'd be hard as hell to work and raise kids at the same time. I'm not all that concerned about it, though, to be honest, because I decided a long time ago that planning for having children is a bad idea. It just seems to lend itself to compromise, you know? I'd rather not have kids than have them with someone I'm not absolutely sure about. And since I can't count on meeting someone like that, I certainly can't count on wanting kids. So I'll dispense with that concern for now.

The second problem is location. I'm just absolutely committed to living either in New York or in another country, and neither seems likely given the difficulty of getting professorship positions these days. I just can't see myself out in the middle of nowhere. I don't even know how to drive. Nor do I want to. Anywhere where a bike or moped won't do is out of the question.

The third problem is inspiration. I count on being continually interested and stimulated and all of that. But friends have told me, in sober tones, that a lot of grad students lose that "spark" and find themselves trapped in these expensive programs with no job prospects. The deal, for me, is that I give up on being able to do basically anything else, in exchange for getting to do the one thing which isn't glamorous or lucrative but which meets my (rather high) lifestyle requirements. If that ceases to be true, it suddenly becomes a very bad deal. ("That's bullshit," S told me, when I expressed my fear. "I absolutely loved grad school. Anyway it's you.")

The fourth is that I'm a woman. I guess this relates to the kids thing. It's all well and good for S to Peter Pan it, living on the lower east side, dating hip younger women (hee hee), looking 25 into his thirties, DJing on the weekends, recording with his band, sticky-tacking posters to his walls and getting his furniture off the street. But when I'm in my thirties, I'm not going to look like an undergrad. And somehow I think that'll make all of the bootleg-ness less glamorous and more.... I don't know... degraded. "I don't want to be living off of twenty-seven dollars a day when I'm thirtysomething," my friend Lucy said bluntly. "And I don't want to be going to Rubulad." I want to be an independent, powerful, gliding kind of woman, confident in my own intelligence, a kind of Sontag figure, when I'm in my thirties and fourties. But what if I just end up being cranky and lonely and a burden to the few people who stick by me? (While I get a kick out of things, I've never been all that fun, to be honest. I'm deeply serious and literal, and it's offputting.) Janice on The Sopranos is my worst nightmare. Being desperate that way... ugh.

I'm also concerned about my psychological motives. I worry that going to grad school would just be a way of validating my claim that I'm more intellectual than the people around me, a contention that I have to admit is central to my sense of identity and which is also probably a defensive mechanism, to some extent, leftover from a time when I felt excluded by the social community I was trapped in. That doesn't mean that I don't think I'm right to value intellectualism so highly, but I wonder if it's really in my nature to the extent that I think it is, or whether that's just something I need to believe in order to respect myself. I also worry that I only feel like I can't go to grad school or pursue an un-lucrative career because no one in my family has. (S, on the other hand, is the progeny of two PhD.s.) Do you see the quandary I'm in? If I go to grad school, I worry that I'm just rebelling against my slightly anti-intellectual parents. If I don't, I worry that I'm caving to them. I have to try to think objectively about the thing, because psychologically my stakes in it are way too high to trust my reasoning otherwise.

I hate that I know I'd think differently about this if I were a man.

The funny thing is that despite how thoroughly I've questioned going to grad school, I really don't see any other options. I'm not very employable.

Wow, writing this was incredibly cathartic and clarifying. Whew. Okay, back to work...

gutless

maybe one day I'll have the courage to get rid of 90% of the stuff I own and just live really beautifully and simply. But I'm too sentimental. It'd take a fire or the prospect of destitution to really make a minimalist out of me.

also I really want these shoes and I feel kind of pathetic about it. Montaigne says that to pray is hypocritical if you'd do the same thing again. (S: "Have you ever noticed how everything he says is true?") I'm not religious but I get the point...

decided to quit smoking because
it seems to be interfering with my birth control
turns out cancer is real
S asked me to
already got written up by my cunt of an RA
reading about cognitive dissonance theory recently and I'd rather not be delusional if I can help it.

I still really like it, though. Ah, well.

1000 words in an hour

and I feel smart again! 1500 to go, 3.5 hours left. Feels so good to have my head on my shoulders again. I'm going to get so trashed tonight, though...

poof again

Archives are moved. and whoever is sending me creepy anonymous texts, please stop, or I'll publish your number here, so you can be at risk for exactly what you're doing to me.

Also, five and a half hours left for a 2500-word paper and I haven't even started. You'd think I'd have learned better in the last two years... but like I said, I'm incredibly dumb in a lot of ways. Have to change...