I Pity The Fool

I have come to the conclusion that wasting my time is a lot more fun than fulfilling obligations.  I would like to become a Lady of Leisure.  Who wants to write my doctoral project for me?  I’m willing to trade/barter my own services- specifically, I could waste your time for you.  Alternately, I could cook you lunch, crochet you a hat, or go through all your old magazines.

On the other hand, maybe I won’t have my dissertation at all.  It would be awesome to retire at age 25 and spend the next several years noodling around before figuring out something else to do (or not do).  All I’d need is someone to pay my billses and find me amusing.

No, I am not taking myself seriously.  This is just an illustration of the stupidity that rushes through my windy little mind while I’m trying to decide if I should get up off my ass and change the CD before going back to staring at a half-blank screen and worrying about nerdy afflictions like carpal tunnel.  Friends, think productive thoughts about me because I need all the help I can get.

When this shit is over I am going to have the biggest friggin’ party.

Now…back to the task at hand…

On my walk from the train to the hospital (where I extern three days a week) this morning, I noticed a medium-sized pile of scary, greenish, extremely hard-looking turds on the sidewalk…with a hat on top.  Not a baseball cap, not a top hat or newsboy cap, but one of those soft, stretchy, pull-over-your-head winter hats.  On top of a pile of shit.  And I thought to myself, boy, I sure feel sorry for the kid who that hat belongs to; some other kids probably snatched it and played keep-away for a while, then put it on the turds and everyone was laughing.  The poor kid.

Then I thought to myself, Self: considering your interactions with much of the population in this neighborhood…what makes you think it was a kid who put it there?

And yes, it was still there on my way home, 8 hours later.

I know, I haven’t been writing much.  But not too many people read this anyway, plus I am not one of those people who thinks that every mundane detail of their lives is interesting to others, or whose existential crisis can only be mediated through web-publishing…  Honestly, many people I know who have blogs seem to have more interesting observations than I may.  Fortunately I don’t know too many losers with crappy blogs.

Anyway though, good news: I got a new laptop (typing on it at this very moment).  So I can not-blog even more comfortably and conveniently.

You’ll hear from me when there’s something interesting to say.  All I have for today is that I was up at Mt. Sinai for an interview, which is near Hunter.  How weird to see what’s changed.  HCHS people, you’ll be happy to know Sing’s and Famiglia are still present, and the kids even have Dunkin Donuts nearby now too.  On the other hand, there is also a Starbucks- blech -though one wonders what took them so long to open up there in the first place.  Hunter students often tended to be over-caffeinated.

Funnily enough, I talked to some current HCHS-ers at a lunch place (also new) to ask if lovely Ms. Scharff still teaches English there.  She does.  The ladies gave their collective thumbs-up to fabulous Sr. Diaz (though they reminded me that he is on sabbatical, which I found out the last time I bothered to try visiting several months ago) and expressed their distaste for a certain English/creative writing professor.  Whom?  You can probably figure it out.

Oh, and one more thing!!!

Speaking of HCHS, my directory arrived over the weekend.  Now I can finally find out what happened (more or less) to those not on Friendster.

The following is a list of activities that should be prohibited on the New York City transit system.* 

• cutting your toenails (I have SEEN this, people!); actually, nail maintenance of any kind should be prohibited.  This includes YOU, lady who files her nails and then looks down at her chest and BLOWS all the little shards and dust off so that it goes flying around onto everyone else.

• spitting (technically, this one is already prohibited, but it needs to be enforced).

• smacking your bitch up (see above).

• clear and present masturbation (yes, seen this too).

• consumption of any of the following: overripe bananas; warm, slightly sour milk; ghetto chinese food; fried chicken (ESPECIALLY people who throw their gnarly gnawed bones under the seats or onto the ground); tuna fish; ANY food with sauce or liquid that can splash onto the people around you.

Thank you, and good night.

*I’m even more peeved at the moment because I just typed this and then it disappeared.

Okay, for anyone who has ever been to my house, do you remember that small room next to my room that I use for storage?  The one that’s full of crap, which is supposed to be a "study," but where I probably haven’t sat at the desk in ten years?  The one where I have accumulated all the detritus of academia?

Yes, that one.  Periodically I go in there and shuffle around my postcard collection, exchange seasonal wardrobe items, or throw away bags full of papers.  But I have not really ever successfully cleaned and organized it to make it a functional room, and every time I even try, I give up before the task is done.  Hadn’t worked on it in months, either.

So what does it take for a depressive procrastinator like myself to attempt this Herculean, Sisyphean task?  AVOIDANCE OF AN EVEN MORE DAUNTING TASK.

Yes.  So now we all know- it takes a dissertation for me to clean out the small room.  Now if it isn’t apparent, guess what I was working on last night and this morning, instead of my dissertation…  And no, it’s not finished, but I did create a new file drawer for all the Pace crap from the past 2 to 3 years that I’m still wary about throwing away, narrowed down the stuff that still needs a home to one box and one pile, and reorganized my postcard collection.  Plus, about half of the top of the desk is visible now, for the first time in years most likely.  And all because of a hateful little obligation called the doctoral project.

How ridiculous.

sitting on the R train, waiting at the Pacific St. station: a frequent location for very religious, evangelistic-type people with very loud voices.

a woman is pacing the platform, she’s probably some type of christian like pentecostal or something, though she could possibly be jehovah’s witness.  she’s bellowing at the top of her lungs about all the things her god will do for you.

two clearly religious muslim women sitting on the train, watching her, with very difficult-to-describe facial expressions.

i don’t mean to offend anyone or imply in the least that any religion is superior to any other religions; i’m personally none of these.  it was just a very strange moment.

I see no one else has quite the same strong feelings as I do, regarding dual deck tape recorders (i.e., no comments.  What’s up with that?).  Hmm.

Anyway, today was not a particularly exciting day among the loonies.  Probably the only noteworthy think about which I might express an observation was the Family Treatment Seminar I attend on Tuesday afternoons.  When a family actually shows up, we watch someone interviewing them through a one-way mirror.  Sometimes they notice that the room has a video camera, microphone (hanging quite obviouly from the ceiling), etc. in it: for example, today, the child said, "The freakiest things in this room are THAT video camera, the microphone, and that window, there’s people behind there."  I don’t know how he knew about the mirror, unless they told him before I got there.  But I digress.  The point I was going to make was that so often, people bring their kids in and complain about them, when a lot of what they’re doing is normal kid stuff.  The parents, sadly, are a problem much more often than they ever imagine or accept themselves to be.

Oh, but I just remembered the other point I was going to make.  At another seminar today, we watched a video about behavior management for defiant children (i.e., brats you don’t want next to you on an airplane, in a restaurant, etc.  Sorry but it’s true.).  It made me wonder how many of these educational shows feature real children (as opposed to actors), and whether the tapes are ever later seen by the children themselves, or people who know them.  How awkward would that be if say, you were a graduate psychology student and realized that the educational video being shown featured YOU when you were a "problem child" at age 5 or so.  I wonder if that’s ever happened.

Well, I guess that’s all for today.  My posts seem to be getting longer, eh Lis?

I hope I’m not boring.

Today, I didn’t get up until almost 11.  That’s quite late for yours truly, although to be fair I hadn’t hit the hay til about 4.  Party time/excellent at Jackie’s b-day festivities.  And when I got up, did I industriously get to work on doctoral project endeavors?  No, I did not.  Instead, I went through a box of ridiculously old papers and related things, and remade a mix tape that I’d created a few months ago.  I remade it because I gave the first one to Lisa.  THAT is because it is a pretty bomb-diggity-ass mix tape.  Almost as good as the tape in Napoleon Dynamite (if you have not yet seen this movie, I order you to go rent it, immediately.  Or tomorrow, or next weekend.  But soon.), but I digress…

Anyway, is anyone else troubled and/or somewhat threatened by the disappearance of the dual-deck tape recorder component of today’s stereos?  I myself find it a sad commentary on the sped-up nature of current day society.  If you really care about someone, or are really depressed, or both, what better way to exercise catharsis than to spend hours carefully selecting, mixing, and holding down one or both pause buttons, to create a musical expression of your sentiment?  My stereo is in dubious condition, at least the CD-player is.  But I’m loathe to dispose of it or upgrade, because the only new stereos that play cassettes just have a single (usually mono) deck.  And then I won’t be able to make tapes that have any songs from other tapes on them.  Granted, the vast majority of my cassette collection dates from 10th grade or earlier, but still.

With countless hours of boring dissertation work looming in the horizon like ever-so-many team-driven oliphants, I have recognized the allure of being able to sit on the couch while writing (rather than freezing my ass off in an uncomfortable chair in the basement, where my cellphone doesn’t work).  A certain sainted mother has volunteered to purchase a laptop for your humble narrator.  Having scoured refurbdepot.com and overstock.com, I have concerns about the possible problems with buying a refurbished computer.  Dell has various deals on new computers, but of course the price really escalates if you actually want the computer to be able to do anything without exploding, imploding, or being hacked into by hordes of cyber-ninjas.  So I checked into a particular deal, I think it was on a Dell Inspiron 6000 or something like that; current price about $729, price after adding on all the things I’d actually need more like $973.  Is this still a good deal?

Thoughts?

(Though I’d hate to delude myself into thinking that too many people are actually reading this.)

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to have a beehive under your scalp, and the sensation of demons tickling your neck with poisoned-tipped feather dusters?

Me either, but now I know what it feels like.  And it ain’t pretty.