So strange to be in the young alumni tent, look around, and think “this is what it felt like when I was in college, these were the people.”

There’s something so special about this place. I am not one to wax poetic about locations — I am ‘transitory’ at best, but Brown is different. It isn’t until you leave that you realize not everyone treats their college, not just their ‘experience’, but the whole package, as something so … loving? happy? Not that everyone here is happy for four years, but even when you’re not excited for life, you can be excited for Brown, for the feeling that the school brings you. It’s the exact opposite of an impersonal, indifferent experience. How can you be sad when Ruth is so happy? Who else holds a flashmob for a departing president with a giant main green celebration with tons of legit free food and a crowd that is legitimately sad to see her go? 

There’s definitely something to the ‘happiest college’ stereotype about Brown. Not everyone will love it, but the type that would tends to congregate here, and they cultivate a culture that, in retrospect, was shockingly unselfish and anti-gloryhunting, relative to what you’d expect from this type of school. All these stupid things that I worried about in high school (and now, after college) with people placing value on the dumbest things, being hypercompetitive about transitory shit, sticking their noses in places that they have no business being in, and puffing out their chests while darting their eyes at their neighbors… I forgot that I didn’t really deal with that for four years. It’s not that campus feels like a closed off bubble of happiness. It’s more that being here is always so comforting. Like returning home, but not even realizing that it IS ‘home’, because it feels so natural. How wonderful it was to arrive here four years ago and realize that academic success did not have to involve thriving off of negativity. And how much easier doing well in school became after that turned into the status quo.

It’s nice that finding alum in random places means that there’s a good chance this person a) had a good time in college b) actually liked the institution itself c) has really varied interests d) is actually good at these varied interests e) would love to hear about your own interests and f) could be obnoxious, but hey, the standards for people who aren’t completely terrible in the ‘real world’ are so low that I will take whatever I can get. There’s something to be said for NOT relishing in mutual misery as a bonding experience. And of course, there are annoying grads and assholes everywhere, but it’s almost awe-inspiring when even someone as misanthropic as myself finds that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Congrats, seventeen-year-old me. You made the right decision. 

Have officially lived on the East Coast for over four years.

Must strive to reverse undesirable New England habits, including, but not limited to: not smiling at strangers on the street, deferring to awkwardness, inability to hold eye contact, expecting anyone who works a cash register to have a terrible attitude.

Meanwhile - allow conversations to transpire without first mentally projecting their course. Try to judge others a little less harshly when it often seems to be the path of least resistance. Remember that generosity is better unacknowledged than unpaid. 

The past few months have been dedicated to more movies than books. It’s a bit frightening to project so much of life on arbitrary works of supposed art (or perhaps it’s the other way around). There’s something comforting, or even unsettling, in finding a filmmaker, an artist, a writer, etc. who sees the world on the same uneven axis as yourself. And you realize - you’re not alone. Even if you’re sitting alone on your couch, eating an apple, engrossed in situations which simultaneously have everything and nothing to do with you.

Last month, I went to a Rachael Yamagata concert with @questionablepearls. The concert was wonderful, but also a culmination of many years of listening to her music under the most varied circumstances. Perhaps the most memorable is sitting outside the counseling office of LSMSA in Natchitoches a week or so after Katrina with a few displaced friends, wondering where I’d even be by this time next month. A girl from my high school in New Orleans approached me. She looked at my iPod and made a comment about Rachael Yamagata. It was probably a thirty second conversation. But skip to December 2011, and there the song is. The same as ever.

“We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. 

I wish for all this to be marked on by body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography - to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience.” 

-Michael Ondaatje

There are moments when I think taking time off is worth it just so I can set aside the space to read books like The English Patient. The language is lush and poetic, while still retaining a bit of blunt cruelty. I wish there were more books out there like this one. Books about the nature of relationships, time, coincidence, violence, loss, belonging. To be emotionally accurate is, at least to me, what literature should embody.

I watched the movie after finishing the novel. It’s a wonderful translation, albeit not exactly a full one (the ending really got the shaft). I wonder why so many people despise it so much. It is a bit slow, but so is the source material, and much of the pacing is the very point of the story. I wish people would stop referring to movies like this as ‘pretentious’ - what does that even mean? 

Both book and movie make you think. About the images that endure after war. The brief moments that fill up a greater space than non-stop action could ever buy. Many call the novel a ‘romance’ or ‘love story.’ Perhaps a better descriptor is that this is a novel about manifestations of love. How often it bleeds through the boundaries we set. So one learns to not view individual stories through facts. Instead, Ondaatje shows how love leans into the environment in which it is built. And how easily that crumbles.

Over the years, Sammy had regretted nearly everything about his affair with Bacon except, until now, its secrecy. The need for stealth and concealment was something that he had always taken for granted as a necessary condition both of that love and of the shadow loves, each paler and more furtive than the last, that it had cast. Back in the summer of 1941, they had stood to lose so much, it seemed, through the shame and ruination of exposure. Sammy could not have known that one day he would come to regard all the things that their loving each other had seemed to put at so much risk – his career in comic books, his relations with his family, his place in the world – as the walls of a prison, an airless, lightless keep from which there was no hope of escape.

 -Michael Chabon

This was an incredible novel, despite my initial doubts about the subject matter (comic books?). Michael Chabon’s writing style is not effortlessly elegant, but it moves at a pace that reminds me of children’s books. Slow down, and you’ll catch the details. The outline is, ultimately, just as compelling as the details. I rarely read books with this type of tone - I love lush, meandering prose that describes emotion, art, and life in a way that compresses the surface area of any pore that could absorb it into a compact shape that flits back and forth while maintaining a frighteningly high density.

But Kavalier and Clay was exciting. It sped along like a pulp, but held zero pretensions about its subject matter and infused the prose with a surprisingly rich vocabulary. And, for once, it wasn’t the style that drew me in, but the story. A story that managed to flip my preferences for the various characters as it progressed, a story free of needless vulgarity, a story which modeled itself after the nostalgic sheen of the period, after a zeitgeist that imbued itself with hope rather than narcissism, after how the fleeting, episodic nature of life can add up to only a small flash of recognition. And it restores my faith a bit in books that don’t chart the exact paths of our thoughts in order to evoke a strong emotion. Most of all, I’m glad that, no matter what path one may choose to get there, that sense of emotion will always be the driving factor. 

I’ve finished Murakami’s latest novel, IQ84, after a few weeks of reading off and on followed by a spurt of speed-reading. To preface: Murakami is one of my favorite authors, and Sputnik Sweetheart is in my top five favorite books, ever. And I read quite a lot of novels, to put it lightly. But 1Q84 really didn’t do it for me.

It’s possible that it was the translation - but I don’t think so. Murakami almost dips into ‘parody of himself’ territory with this one, even though it’s as page-turning as ever. He has a habit of intertextual allusion and subtlety, but I felt as though its usage in 1Q84 was a bit trite. Ultimately, what holds vague writing together is a suggestion of collective emotional sentiment lying underneath an incomprehensible world. In that respect, Orwell’s original 1984 is far superior. 

What I love about Murakami is his simplicity: he can take a small idea and let it remain small even though the world around it is expanding. Add a touch of the surreal, and you get something very beautiful. Perhaps simplicity isn’t the right word - it’s more of a transparent complexity. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of “show, don’t tell” here, even with his tried and true themes of nostalgia, loneliness, and words as isolation. 

At first I wondered - was it me who changed, or Murakami? Surely his appeal couldn’t be based on whatever 1Q84’s foundations appear to be made out of. But I think I understand now: the Murakami books I love show how our emotions can physically manifest themselves in otherworldly ways, and how the pain that arises from this recognition is nearly a universal trait. To do that, you don’t have to be the ‘master of your craft’ in the way of Margaret Atwood or Nabokov. The truth is, Murakami isn’t as ‘good’ of a writer, technically, as they are. It’s ironic that much of 1Q84 revolves around how a fascinating idea can be tweaked from its skeleton to a rich, literary work. I’m not sure what collective emotional chord he’s trying to strike here, but everything feels a bit fake, and not in an intriguing way. Shame, really.

Maybe I’ve been spending too much time on the internet (ha. ha.), but it seems as though every trendy word-based blog for educated, white-collar people in their twenties is full of so-called revelatory statements about being overly dependent on technology, how false friendships can be, downfalls of nostalgia, why it’s ok to not go out every weekend, and when it is culturally appropriate to like certain bands, books, and movies. But all those observations boil down to inept self-deprecation and unbelievable narcissism parading around under a guise of ‘the modern condition, part xxix’. 

Just because the internet now exists for all of us constantly make sure our lack of skill in self-expression still fights with our inability to believe we have nothing unique to say doesn’t mean any of this is remotely new or interesting. You want a good bildungsroman describing the existential woes of overeducated, privileged youths? Re-read Franny and Zooey and shut the fuck up. Seriously. Of course most of the friendships we make are transient and meaningless. Some of us realize this earlier than others, and others just internalize it so as not to be overtly bothered by it. But you know what? There’s no point in passive about it either. You have to try in order to get a response, sorry to say. Girls, guys will not hit on you at bars forever. Dudes, you are not going to be happy with only getting ass once those few girls you knew who had their shit together stop talking to you. Dissatisfied with how often you see certain people? Call them up. And if they still suck, then trust me, it’s not because of the claustrophobic loneliness of urban life that people have been, believe or not, discussing with more insight than the collective whole of tumblr/blogspot/tweetitlehere.com for hundreds of years. 

I like to read why people like things. I like to hear how their personal lives are intertwined with bands, books, etc. Not “LOL SORRY GHOST OF IAN CURTIS BUT I CANNOT STOP LISTENING TO ‘LOW’ BY T-PAIN, WHICH IS AT ITS CULTURAL APEX OF BEING OUT OF DATE ENOUGH TO NOT LABEL ME WITH BAD TASTE BUT JUST OLD ENOUGH TO LAUGH ABOUT AND DANCE TO IN A CONTEMPORARY MANNER.” I know we sometimes need outlets for these emotions, but this is not brilliance in the form of cultural significance. Mingling these references with some spiel about how ‘life is tough because my rambling conversations with my gchat contact list are a reflection of the vacuous nature of my self-important existential crisis’ is a disservice to even the most egregious of pop culture indulgences. 

One last thing. I admit that, during college, I succumbed to the whole “well, it’s the weekend. what party is there? what will I do? will this make me happy tomorrow?” etc. etc. But then time passed. I got a little more mature (hopefully), and I realized that it. does. not. fucking. matter. No one cares about your social life, or lack thereof, as much as you, because they are all too busy worrying about the same thing: themselves. So no, I don’t need to read about why “it’s ok to stay in on a Friday night”. If you want to go out, and do it because you want to have a good time, you might actually do so. Or not. But that’s something called ‘life’. Please note that there are a lot of ways to be content. And, to be honest, after a certain age, if this really still bothers you, it is seriously time to reevaluate. 

The thing is, I don’t hate technology, or the internet, etc. And hey, this entire thing could be read as painfully hypocritical, but I guess that’s pretty unavoidable. I can be a hypocrite. I try not to be, but this is the best I can do. And you know, I do often enjoy reading what people have to say online. It’s usually when they link change with personal experience in a sincere, heartfelt manner. The point is: I am so sick of whining being passed off as cleverness. IT IS NOT CLEVER. Not everyone with the technical ability to construct a sentence has the creativity to make it anything but verbal graffiti. 

Yesterday, I visited the library I spent probably over half my waking moments during college in, to give a conservative estimate. I hadn’t been there since May, when I finished a horrible essay and wanted nothing else than to sit on the papa-san chair in our common room and kvetch about something non-academic. 

Nothing had changed, not even me, not in any way that would be relevant to a library. The funny thing about time passing, which teachers have probably absorbed into their bone marrow, is that when one set of people leave, they are immediately replaced by jarringly similar counterparts. I thought I saw someone I recognized, but it was only the slightly updated version. Different face, same hair, same clothing, same manner of walking. I wonder who I once replaced, who has replaced me.

When you live in a different building every year of college, any kind of consistency is appreciated. And, in that regard, the library has amassed a collection of moments that may or may not add up to more than the sum of its parts. I suppose it’s what I thought about when I walked in - the basement classroom where I had my first fiction class, the third floor stacks where I studied for the LSAT and marveled how quickly time could pass when taking timed test sections, the second floor stacks where I tried to study for the next day’s final but ended up reading three copies of Entertainment Weekly instead, the first floor computer clusters where I wrote way too many literature essays that scrambled for any semblance of an original idea, the second floor computer clusters where I fell asleep onto the keyboard while applying to grad school, the lobby where I convinced a friend to break up with her boyfriend as she called me from the bathroom of his dorm.

The strangest moment was walking into the periodicals room, where I did most of my studying. There was the table I sat in when I was first started to come here and read To the Lighthouse in one afternoon freshman year, saying to myself “I think this is changing my entire outlook on literature… and therefore, life” while watching the clock because I had promised myself that I would leave by 6 PM because it was Saturday and I needed to get a life (ha, no). The desks by the window where I wrote all my fiction and playwriting assignments. The tables where I stared at piles of slides, wrote one-page response papers, made friends from the strangest coincidences, drank way too much Tropicana orange juice, exhausted my iPod, and got shushed by more people than I ever cared to shush. 

Strange that you can walk into a place and remember all these things. I used to sit around and eavesdrop on upperclassmen talking about the perils of being over the age of twenty-one. Now, I’m three months past 22 and think I’ve accepted the reality of always feeling vaguely dislocated. I suppose it’s not exactly ironic that it’s a library that grounds me. But there’s an upside to all of this - I can actually check out books I want to read now! You know, ones not entitled “The History of Tropical Disease” or “Philanthropy and the blah blah of I don’t care”. And that is worth at least two terrible five-page papers about the most asinine of historical anecdotes.