Is it Thursday already? Where did this week go? Where did this month go, for that matter?
Here’s a few options:
1) Moving. Mid-semester is the perfect time to pack up belongings and move across town. Tonight, I put the first coat of paint on my new room, which was formerly a nice teal-ish color. And packed up all the odds and ends in my room. And watched the season premiere of the Office.
2) Classes. Reading about 500 pages a week at this point. Seriously. It makes me scream inside some days.
3) Sarah Martin. One month in, and going well. This is the Internet, people.
4) Baseball playoffs. I wish I could say I was watching any of the pennant races, but I’d be lying.
5)
6)
7) Season One of Scrubs. Finished last night during a coughing fit that kept me up at 3 a.m. Good times.
I’ve taken to watching a lot of Scrubs lately. And my gosh, it’s funny stuff. I may have to repent of my rant about Zach Braff some years ago. I don’t think he’s the savior of our generation, and I still didn’t think Garden State was anything worth writing home about, but he’s pegged my inner thought life to the wall. More than once in the last month, I’ve wished that my life was a Scrubbs episode, and that someone was dramatically interpreting my inner depiction of me dripping onto the floor like a pat of melted butter.
For the record, I’m going to start posting daily. This is just a first stab at a) making good on this promise and b) being coherent for a solid paragraph.
Aside from being the title to a pretty nice song by this guy, it’s the love-cringe relationship of my life. You can never go home again; you can never completely be at peace with where you came from. I think it’s part of the differentiation thing that makes people who they are apart from their parentas familias; philosophically, I think it’s why I can’t ever go completely with Hegel.
Anyway, a nice little mediation here by a guy I grew up with on what’s happened to Shreveport since we left. For the record, it’s mostly (read: 90%) true. If Facebook is any indication, it’s almost all true. When the riverboats came in, I think Shreveport became exceptionally un-creative when it came to defining entertainment. Slowly, the local coffee places shut down; the dollar theater that showed Bogart movies in the summer turned into a Stage; chain restaurants proliferated like maggots. Frankly, it makes me a little nauseated to go to Shreveport and see the retail cesspool that is swallowing it up some days. The solution to cultural malaise is not, I repeat–not, another option or another nightspot.
The Shreveport I grew up in largely doesn’t exist, ten years hence. It’s pretty sad that a decade can completely obliterate the scene of a pretty great childhood. The family still lives there, and I love them, and when I go to Shreveport, they’re all of the town I see. I pretty much loathe driving through the center of town, or leaving the house in Shreveport for that matter. Maybe it’s because I hate to see what has become of my hometown; maybe it’s because even home is not immune from wanting to grow up.
It’s been about three weeks since the last post, which is indicative of the fact that it’s back to school time. Classes are already two weeks deep, and I’m mildly swamped with about 400+ pages of reading a week. It happens.
Notable news:
–The Office Season 3 comes out Tuesday! Guess who’s spending most of Tuesday night holed up on the couch.
–Had a date on Thursday. Pretty nice, if I do say so myself. She has a great smile and loves her dayplanner; I have a toothy smile and could care less about a dayplanner, so we get along well, I think.
–New Springsteen album out next month.
–Austin City Limits festival in two weekends. This’ll be my 4th, and something I’ll probably continue to budget both time and money for so long as I’m living in this part of the country.
–Been reading a lot on tradition-based reasoning, Catholic theology, and the relationship between nature and grace. I could never be a Catholic by virtue of the protests that I have against Rome: women in the ministry, Mary, and that I don’t believe in a monolithic tradition that is controvertible with the see of Peter. I believe there’s a plurality within Christianity that is both necessary and healthy, and that we should always seek reunion, but to say that one must be a practicing Catholic to either a) think with the tradition of the church or b) live within this tradition that fuels such thinking is ridiculous.
–Writing a paper on Labor Day on HIV, Kenya, and revisioning sexuality in terms other than do it/don’t do it. Sound like a good thing to do instead of say, swimming or going to Austin? That’s what I thought too.
More substance later, but feel free to offer your own top six of the last week.
