Life Gets In The Way
Almost a week has gone by since I last updated. I think about this blog every day and there is so much I want to post. For one thing, I am editing a review/critique I wrote of Dr. Gill's book that I want to post. All this week I have been working on my Luce Irigaray paper for Dr. Greene and I have successfully made no progress on both that paper and my political research methods paper.
Now I sit in the library computer lab listening to Air on my iPod avoiding my PLS 209 homework. SPSS really is a great program, but does that mean that I should have to use it? As usual my mind is wandering so be patient with me.
Memory. Are you living a life that you would remember? Think of your every act through the lens of eternal return; you could live it again ad infinitum. Must we distill our lives down to a few grand memories, or even worse, just one? That idea seems so oppressive because we are unwilling to see our detailed experiences as distillable. History will do it for us whether we like it or not. But why give in to the inevitable cleansing of history. We are alive now and evaluate our lives from only that vantage point. History is for us nothing more than the application of metaphor to contemporary contexts.
Such wanderings are brought on by film, After Life, a 1998 film by Japanese director Hirokazu Koreeda to be precise. This was the last Wednesday of the semester, possibly the last of my college career, and I could not have come up with a better way to spend it. Yeah I am behind on my papers and I could be doing better in my classes. Yes I am uncertain about my future (by that I mean what I will be doing two months from now). But I am excited. Tonight I am overflowing with happiness about the possibilities, about the unknowability of the future, about the truly future future. For weeks, almost months, my sleep has been interrupted with anxiety. I think of almost nothing but what will happen next. While I wait on others to decide my fate I rock between despair and ecstasy. Films and books provide my respite.
This semester has been a good end and if I am still here next semester that will be good too. Life is simpler for me than it has been in the past. Julie and I live alone. We spend our weekends reading, visiting my parents, and hanging out with Jeremy. I spend less money now, I read more, and I wait for the future. Being ready to move on is a strange position to be in. I feel forever transitory but am going nowhere. I stand on a platform waiting for a train that may not come. Maybe I should bring in some rain, put on a trenchcoat and a fedora, and smoke a cigarette as homage to Humphrey Bogart.
Who is this guy?
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