The Curse of the Thirty-First

My emotions have just gone so out of whack that I don't know what they are, let alone how to contain them. I don't even feel like writing about any of this is a good idea, for lots of reasons that I have no doubt I'll get to, but suffice to say that if today you come here seeking reasoned, well-tempered, decently thought-out observations, you're liable to be disappointed.

March 31st just hasn't been kind to my family. Granted, there's really only one bad thing that's happened on March 31st prior to today, and that was the sudden passing of my grandmother on this date in 2005. I remember the whole scene like it was yesterday, no matter how much I wish I could forget it: I woke up, went to seminar, and after an uneventful morning was about to go have lunch with my roommate Charlie. I casually checked my phone, saw a voicemail, and heard my father's benign voice telling me to call him back. I sensed that something was up, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. When I called him back, and he told me my grandmother was dead, I fucking lost it. I staggered backwards to the nearest bench and fell to it, waving off Charlie to go eat while my father tried to explain to me how the hell that had happened. When the discussion was over, I ran back inside, slammed the door of my room, and bawled for what must have been at least an hour. It was, and still is, one of the worst feelings I ever had in my life.

I remember those feelings clearly every time this part of the year rolls around -- partly because my grandfather died almost two weeks shy of one year afterwards, on March 18, 2006 -- but I'm sure for my mother it's even worse. She was inconsolable for quite some time, and it took her almost a year to even be able to talk about Grandma without welling up. And despite what she insists, it still hurts.

So for more bad shit to go down on the anniversary of that, of all the possible days in the year, seems less like coincidence than it does karmic bullshit.

Mom insists she's fine, and I'm sure to a certain degree she is, but I'm not entirely sure I am. And like I said earlier, I can't even put a name to what I'm feeling. I'm upset, for sure, and incredibly angry, for a lot of different reasons. (Let's just say a few more names have been written on my shit list in permanent marker within the past hour.) I feel like Mom is really trying to be strong and tough and deal with this, but I just can't entirely believe her when she says that everything really is alright. Because it's not.

But by the same token, I know that this feeling isn't just the result of what happened today. I've been feeling in a malaise for the past few days, and even people that don't know me too well have taken note. In fact, I was pretty surprised at who did notice, almost as surprised as I was at who didn't. (But since I don't want this to turn back into the angsty immaturity of my Xanga days, let's just say that certain things have been duly noted.)

I needed a weekend off to relax myself, and I got it, but certain other frustrations kicked back into gear and unsettled things to the point where I'm not sure the weekend ended up on a higher note for me than it did before. And since then, my interest and motivation have once more plummeted to shockingly low levels, all during the time of the year when I really need these things to start ramping themselves up.

So if I've been able to come up with anything as a source of my current despondency, I have to believe that it's a perfect storm of fucked-up things hitting all at once, exacerbated by today's craptacular revelations. And perhaps even more insulting to my psyche is that tomorrow is April Fool's Day, a day that I have gone on record as deploring. And despite my better judgment, I allowed myself to be talked into not one but two pranks that, had they gone off, would have been really amusing. One, in particular, had me especially excited, and looking forward to springing the trap. Now, I'm not even sure I want to go through with them. And furthermore, I feel like karma is once again screwing me over for going against my convictions.

Not that my convictions are really stable right now anyway. For the first time in a long time, life has started to scare me again. Nothing seems to have been working out in my favor lately, whether little things or bigger issues, and the trend is beginning to feel disturbing. It's to the point where I'm not sure I can lean back on my typical crutch and blame it all on State College because it's starting to feel more pervasive than that. And that's what's gotten me so unbelievably fucked up.

A Tuesday

I'm an extremely superstitious person. I can't help that. Perhaps it was fated by Destiny when she bestowed upon me the gifts necessary to become a passably incisive literary critic: the type of person who seeks to imbue meaning into every text he encounters is liable to find himself seeking explanation for every event in his life, irrespective of significance or relevance.

At the same time, I have to believe that my faithfulness towards superstition has damned me to fall into a vicious circle. The more I believe that a circumstance is going to end up in a particular way, the more I will subconsciously do to ensure that negative outcome. And my hatred of Tuesdays is the kind of thing that is both reflexive and self-perpetuating.

I came to the conclusion that Tuesdays were the worst day of the week a long time ago. The argument works through simple process of elimination. Firstly, discount Saturdays and Sundays because the weekend is, for obvious reasons, not even in the competition. That leaves us the work week. The two easiest days to discount then are Wednesday and Friday -- the latter because it is the final day of the week and precursor to the weekend, and the former because "Hump Day," as it is affectionately known in many circles, marks the beginning of the downhill slide towards relaxation. I further remove Monday from the discussion because, though it is the start of a new week, most people spend a substantial portion of the day bitching and adjusting, as opposed to actually being productive. Its therapeutic nature makes it at least borderline tolerable. The competition, then, is between Tuesday and Thursday, so what do we have framing these two? On Thursday, we're on the downward slide that Wednesday had foretold, and we can anticipate tomorrow being Friday, so it can't be all that bad. But on Tuesday, you're framed by the beginning of the week and by the minimally-inviting promise that you're almost halfway there.

So fuck Tuesdays. QED.

Yet something about this past Tuesday -- St. Patrick's Day, for those of you playing at home from some indiscriminate week in the near or distant future -- felt like it wanted to buck the system, go against the trend. It was a heads-up, one-on-one battle between a shockingly positive mind set and the inexorable march of fate. So let's get right to the highlights.

The day was doomed to a bad start. I'd gone out Monday night with a friend to see Watchmen. I had promised I'd attend with her before spring break, but while in DC for a few days, I went to see it with Alicia. So I already knew what was going to happen, and I knew that I was not going to enjoy it. (It's not that it's a bad movie, per se, but I know I just didn't like it.) So, despite my better judgment, I dispensed with my typical viewing of 24 to once more see a movie I did not care for. And rather than cut my losses and head to sleep, I instead returned to my friend's apartment, where we played Rock Band until almost 3:00am. And we both had seminar (the same seminar, in fact) the next morning. At 9:00am.

So began the craptacularity [trademark pending]. Seminar was uneventful, perhaps with the exception of the fact that I confidently participated and made an impact despite having only read two of the play's five acts. After a short pat on the back, I printed my material for my editing class and proceeded to The Corner Room for a lengthy lunch and reading respite. I ate, I drank, I finished my crossword, and I put a large dent into Going to See the Elephant (Early Review post forthcoming). Things were looking up.

As I made my way to editing, I couldn't help but notice that spring was most definitely in the air. Not so much because the weather was warm, but because the intangible sensation of the season seemed omnipresent. Winter warm spells are nice, but they carry a sense of dread, because you know that there's a cold front just waiting to shatter the serenity, to break in and kill any anticipation of prolonged warmth. But when spring is really, truly here, you feel the season fighting back. It won't let the chill back in, even if the temperature does drop a bit here and there. This was what I felt as I walked to class: the battle had raged, and spring was emerging triumphant. So too were my spirits.

The rest of my classes passed without incident. I reflected on how the job search seemed to be in good shape -- I even applied for a position that seemed particularly suited to my skills and interests. I returned home, curled up with Going to See the Elephant, and finished it. And, despite a threatening last-minute twist, it ended in a fully satisfying fashion, which further instilled a sense of profound happiness within me. Could it be that the simple joys of the day were going to successfully squash the heavy hand of fate?

It seemed so, until about 7:30pm. After watching Jeopardy!, I became inexplicably tired, but I didn't want to go to sleep. In fact, I wanted to read more. So I opted to drive to Starbucks, grab some coffee to wake me up, and try to put another notch in Gain, the Richard Powers novel I've been slowly working on since October. I parked, I drank, I read, I got sleepy again. Only an hour and a half later, I was ready to go.

Ascending the stairs, and strolled confidently to the door, pushed it open, and approached my car. Which had a large pink envelope in the windshield wipers reading "Parking Violation."

Rather than simply recount the string of curses I spewed forth at the sight, I should explain that I was equal parts pissed off and confounded. Upon my arrival, I'd actively sought out some sign, either posted in the lot or written on the meter, that would explain when the meter ran out. Finding none, I checked the other spaces to see if other cars were parked at expired meters; they were. (Apparently, they also had permits, but I did not take note of this.) By all accounts, I thought I was okay, but I was obviously wrong.

What was most irritating, though, was that it wasn't the Borough that cited me -- it was some private company called Parking Management & Enforcement. The ticket had no address: just a P.O. Box, a phone number, and a website, which also features no information about the company or its office location. Furthermore, the ticket claimed I had a mere 48 hours to pay the $15 fine -- not extravagant, I know, but still thrice as expensive as a standard Borough citation -- or they would sic a collections agency on me. Essentially, their operation is designed to eliminate any option to argue: just shut up, pay, and deal with it. But since I attempted to find some kind of posting about the meters' hours of operation and failed, I don't feel like I can just lay down and deal with this.

So now, I'm on an agitated quest to find a human being at this place to argue with, because I want to at least make it worth the $15 I may end up shelling out anyway. But with the (admittedly, stolen) Internet at my apartment on the fritz, my options are to either go back to campus, find a free WiFi hotspot in town, or visit to friends' houses to borrow their connections. None of which are terribly problematic options, but they are terribly inconvenient.

Which essentially brings me to my point: whether a mere character flaw or damaging vice, I find that I get most angry at little things, not at major concerns. I have a genuine belief that most "big deal" things end up resolving themselves in satisfactory ways: after all, whenever I see people that I consider to be utter wastes of life managing to keep their shit together, I figure little ol' me and my nice education should be able to traverse the treacherous tides decently enough. But my inability to control the more minute details of my life -- like, say, bullshit partking tickets -- irritates me because it's enough to sidetrack me from my larger goals. And sadly, the little bumps end up adding up, even though they inevitably are forgotten in a relatively short period of time.

And I've discovered, furthermore, that my experiences in graduate school have amounted to that very type of sum. All told, my degree is on-track and my job search is, while not terribly fruitful, not completely stalled out either. But the past two years have thrown a lot of bumps onto my road. Some have been fairly minor (centipede infestations, loss of motivation, etc.); others have been pretty life-changing (complete career change; end of a long-term relationship, etc.). Yet they all add up to a sense that this period of my life has been excessively flawed, intensely unhappy, and ultimately damaging. Despite trying to see it all as a chance to grow and improve, it's proven to be a consistently demeaning set of challenges that have come at a troublingly persistent pace.

Having thought all this through, the overwhelming feeling I was left with is that, as incomprehensible as it might seem to the sane, rational mind, the town of State College must be out to get me. And as ridiculous as it must sound to posit that an entire municipality is somehow in control of my personal wheel of fortune, I'm equally hard-pressed to come up with events and occurrences while here that I can't classify as dire, dour, or some diabolical mix of both. So my lamentably superstitious mind clings to that explanation, implausible though it may be. Which is, despite my tone, a blessing in disguise, because that means I have but two more months left until I can dispatch this unfortunate chapter from my narrative and carry on writing the story I want to write, with a degree that identifies me as master not only of the arts but of my own fate.

Early Review: The Power of Who!

As the current educationally-related bane of my existence reaches its moment of completion, I'll take this opportunity to put forth one last spurt of fauxductivity that is sure to make the folks at LibraryThing very happy.

In yet another installment of "Dave has too many Early Reviewer books in his queue and the backlog has gotten to him so badly that he needs to read and review them all at once," I give you my review of Bob Beaudine's inspirational self-help book The Power of Who! You Already Know Everyone You Need to Know, published in January of this year. I have reprinted my review below for those of you who may care -- knowing full well, of course, that painfully few (if any) of you actually do. At least I mean well.

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Bob Beaudine's book The Power of Who! opens with a very personable introduction, followed by sentence that is marked out in block-quote style, as if to suggest that it above all else is worth remembering. That sentence is, and I quote, "Take everything you have ever heard or learned about networking and just throw it out" (xiv). It's a radical and memorable idea. The presentation of that idea, however, is a microcosm of his entire book. Beaudine has some fresh, new ideas, and he presents them clearly and convincingly, but the vast majority of the book falls into typical self-help territory -- though, admittedly, it's an awfully fun read.

The essential premise of the book is, according to its subtitle, that you already know everyone you need to know. Beaudine suggests that if you consciously think about your friends and relations, you can come up with a circle of about 100 people and 40 goals/steps towards achieving the success and satisfaction you've always dreamed of. After outlining these ideas, and giving some pretty compelling reasons for their legitimacy, Beaudine uses them to introduce a new model of networking that involves not random, possibly-well-placed strangers, but the friends you already know and love -- friends that are willing to help you just because you are you. Understanding this and using it to your advantage, according to Beaudine, is the key to realizing your dreams.

At first glance -- and especially because I tend to write in a fairly jaded, unconvinced voice -- it may seem as if Beaudine's plan is a whole lot of self-help hoo-hah. But I have to confess that the first half of the book, in which he explains and illustrates this plan, is actually the best part. Beaudine argues rather convincingly for the inefficacy of networking, and while he tends to lean on words like "fate" and "destiny" a little too strongly for the pragmatist's liking, the simple logic of his reasoning is surprisingly strong. Not only does it make sense, but it's fun to read, interspersed with anecdotes and situations that make you feel less like a member of a large audience and more like a friend.

While The Power of Who! starts out very strongly, however, its effects begin to wane as time goes on. As the book progresses, Beaudine opts to shift towards business advice mode, dispensing his time-tested wisdom on such things as interview skills and the people with whom you should surround yourself to guarantee success. And while much of this information is, like the first part, practical and well thought out, it's also the kind of thing that one can find in almost any business or self-help book. After all, how many times can one be expected to read that the best thing one can do in an interview is to "be yourself" before it gets a little tiresome. Whereas the book starts off on a rather unusual and refreshing foot, it slips into tedious redundancy as it approaches its end.

Even more disconcerting is the fact that Beaudine's examples betray one of the weaknesses in his argument that he only very briefly considers: the placement and position of your "Who!" is what makes them so effective -- i.e., if your "Who!" are CEOs and presidents, you're likely to find that they will, in fact, take care of most any job problem you face. Unfortunately for the rest of us -- and yes, that includes the younger crowd, whom Beaudine mentions for a short moment in a later chapter but otherwise glosses over -- we may not have "Who!" friends that are nearly as well-connected. And sure, the argument rests upon circles intersecting with other circles, but I don't think Beaudine acknowledges fully enough the plain fact that some people's circles are just going to be objectively better than others'.

While that notion threatens to derail the book and send it face-first into accusations of elitism, Beaudine wisely tempers these notions by telling amusing and witty stories about his own life. Stories that, yes, involve very highly-connected people (the first one involves a gentleman named George W., and I'll give you two guesses as to who he is), but stories that are told in a very personable, down-to-earth style that tempers the highfalutin nature of their subjects. Beaudine's storytelling style truly helps ground the book, and while his constant interjections of "Big Mistake!" may occasionally get tiresome, you never get the sense that you're reading the work of a man who's out of touch with hard work, no matter how wealthy and successful he may be.

All told, if the self-help thing is up your alley, it's hard to say no to The Power of Who! When you think about Beaudine's theory completely, it's a low-pressure and very practical idea that, even at its simplest level, is easy to execute. (And if you're not finding success, it can't really hurt, can it?) I only wish that the whole book was as lucid and enlightening as the first half, because then it would have really been worth the strong recommendation. Regardless, it's at the very least worth a gander.

Early Review: Any Given Doomsday

After an afternoon of working on a paper that has failed to hold my interest or attention for very long, I've opted to distract myself by once more digging into my to-be-reviewed pile and convincing LibraryThing that my opinions are worth a damn.

In today's procrastinatory installment of Dave as Early Reviewer, I present the first book in Lori Handeland's new fantasy series, entitled The Phoenix Chronicles. For the benefit of my faithful readers who like their reading extra pulpy, I present below my review of Any Given Doomsday, which was first published in November 2008.

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Let me preface my review of Lori Handeland's novel Any Given Doomsday by confessing that pulpy vampire fiction isn't really my cup of tea. Even as I was drawn into the book and found many of its scenes surprisingly compelling, I couldn't help but fixate on the fact that this just isn't my kind of reading. Ultimately, that's the way I feel I have to assess the novel: it's probably ideal for fans of the author or the genre, but I doubt it's likely to win over any non-believers.

The story revolves around psychic former cop Elizabeth Phoenix, who has attempted to move past the death of her former partner by working for his widow's bar. Her psychic abilities send her to the home of her former foster mother, Ruthie, whom Liz finds viciously murdered. As she will later discover, though, Ruthie bestowed Liz with a special gift in her dying moments, forcing Liz to come to terms with both her gift and the newfound curse she has to carry -- all, of course, in order to save mankind from nasty demons.

If my wrap-up was excessively glib at the end, it is at least in keeping with the tone of the novel. Liz is our first-person narrator, and we are privileged with the firsthand experience she provides us of both the human (jealousy, confusion, denial, etc.) and nonhuman (transformations, ghost whispers, demon killing, etc.) struggles she is forced to endure. While these would surely be enough to confuse and irritate even the most hardened of souls, Liz is the type of character who, in Handeland's words, "will say anything." This is not always, as it turns out, good for the novel. Though Liz's dry riffing does add a touch of humor to the proceedings, the fact is that it often feels out of place, often rendering Liz a character that feels painfully immature. Yes, she's only twenty-five, but you would think after a while she would catch on to the admittedly screwed-up nuances of her new world.

The novel actually works best when it is concealing, rather than revealing, its hand. The early scenes of Liz's fights against strange creatures are surprisingly frightening because we share her uncertainty and respect her need to improvise in order to save her own life. But the creepy crawly creatures of the story are most intimidating when we don't know what we're up to -- sadly, as the novel progresses and we find out what's going down, the intimidation factor wears off (perhaps because we only see a small portion of the master plan).

Fans of urban fantasy will be unsurprised to learn that the book is dripping with illicit sexual encounters, but again, sparer turns out to be better as the novel goes on. When the first flickers of tension break out into a full-blown sexual encounter halfway through the book, the impact is intense and evocative, just as Handeland presumably wants it to be. But the ashes are left to smolder a bit too long, and ultimately the novel seems to devolve into a series of critical sex scenes that tease at and lead up to a final, climactic sex scene that, unsurprisingly, feels a little empty and unsatisfying by the time it finally hints. A little goes a long way, but a lot tends to numb the reader by the time the plot machinations are finished.

By the time the novel is done, it seems a bit disheartening to find that the conclusion really only sets up the fact that there's another book to come in the series -- a volume that has a sneak preview right after the last page, go figure! Unfortunately, Any Given Doomsday feels a little bit too much like setup for my liking, resulting in a novel that has a bunch of disparate parts that all seem like they want to work together but don't quite mesh. I suspect it's because Handeland figured she would smooth everything out over the next few books. To that end, I have to admit that Any Given Doomsday will probably have fantasy fans waiting to see what will come next. But if it's not up your alley, one trip into The Phoenix Chronicles will probably be more than enough for you.

Early Review: The Assignment

Concluding my procrastination at fulfilling my LibraryThing responsibilities, I present one final review-in-waiting that came as a result of Early Reviewers.

Saving the oddest for last, I present my review of The Assignment; or, On the Observing of the Observer of the Observers, written in 1986 by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, translated in 1988 by Joel Agee, and published afresh in October of 2008. For the benefit of those who don't typically look at my LibraryThing profile, I hope the review will turn some more folks on to this decidedly odd little novella.

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I have to give Joel Agee a great deal of credit. As the translator of Friedrich Dürrenmatt's exceedingly quirky 1986 novella The Assignment; or, On the Observing of the Observer of the Observers, he recognized both potential and difficulty and managed to rise to the challenge with aplomb.

Potential, because the novella, though over twenty years old, manages to speak to the kind of panic that is urgent and contemporaneous. Opening with the wonderfully cinematic scene of a coffin being suspended by helicopter and transported across Europe, the story quickly takes us into the world of a journalist known only as F. She has been hired by the widow of the woman in the coffin, Tina von Lambert, to reconstruct her murder as a documentary in the hopes of solving the otherwise cold case. As F. travels to North Africa, she becomes enmeshed in complex political machinations, switches of identity, and dangerous missions that entrap her in a labyrinth beneath the desert from which she must, against all odds, escape.

Difficulty, because each of the novel's twenty-four chapters consists of a single sentence. The enlightening foreward by Theodore Ziolkowski explains that Dürrenmatt was inspired by Bach, whose Well Tempered Clavier I likewise featured twenty-four movements (in German, we are told, the word for a sentence and a musical movement is the same). The result is a story that must have been a translator's nightmare, as ideas and clauses pile on top of one another and stream-of-consciousness is always on the verge of taking over the narrative's tenuous grasp on order.

The question that must be answered, of course, is does it all work? As a cohesive unit, surprisingly, it does. Agee's ability to keep the single-sentence unity of each chapter intact contributes strongly to the aforementioned sense of urgency: the short chapters glide quickly, the longer chapters gain pace as the reader progresses. The result is a novel that pushes uncomfortably forward while the screws of the plot twist and turn in innumerable ways. That it forces us to slow down but does not allow us to adds to the effect of the book on the reader.

That the book seems constantly on the verge of spinning out of control is in no small part the result of Dürrenmatt's subject matter. The novel's central conspiracy becomes almost completely irrelevant by the end while, as the convoluted subtitle suggests, the theme of constant surveillance emerges. Dürrenmatt's must have sensed that the Orwellian Big Brother of his time was either present or on the verge of being realized, because he presciently ties constant observation with large-scale international conspiracy in a way that makes the novel feel (almost) at home in the present as it did in the mid-1980s.

Perhaps the only piece of the puzzle that doesn't quite mesh so well is that it is incredibly hard to decipher whether or not Dürrenmatt actually ties all the loose ends together. It seems obvious that the central argument of the book is far more concerned with confusion and coercion than with clarity, but a bit of resolution would have been somewhat more helpful. The deus ex machina ending is slightly unsatisfying, but perhaps no more unexpected or unusual than anything else that preceded it. In short, the novella refuses to tidy things up -- and perhaps that's the point -- but it still concludes the work on an uneasy note that feels like it has more to do with merely the themes.

But the fact that the book has become more accurate and realistic since its initial publication in German is a testament to the strength of Dürrenmatt's material. The Assignment represents the work of an author who sensed the need to capture something greater than he could fathom, as well as the work of a translator who sensed a great thing that needed to be realized. Both succeed gloriously, producing a work that feels frighteningly contemporary -- and, to be sure, just downright frightening.

Simple Pleasures, Drastic Measures

I saw an eagle today, and it got me thinking.

Okay, perhaps it wasn't an eagle proper. The partially failed efforts of my eighteenth century seminar professor to successfully clear a dry-erase board resulted in a smeared dry-erase pattern that vaguely resembled an aerie-dweller. At least, I thought so. You too can be the judge.

(Now might be a great time to point out that I have a Twitter now! You should go check it out and follow, since I'm a whore for shameless self-promotion and desperately require attention in order to feed the falsely extravagant ego that's standing in front of an otherwise hollow, weak-willed shell of a man.)

Regardless of your own personal view on the legitimacy or merit of spying animal shapes in semi-satisfactory erasures, the fact that I found, documented, felt the need to comment upon, and shared such a discovery spoke strongly to me. It reawakened a particular yen that kicks in every now and again, one that gets its share of face time in this, my humble little corner of the Internet (when that corner is not cluttered, of course, with bitching after bantering after diatribe after ranting after raving after tirade about how awful and soul-sucking my work currently is). And that is, of course, my desire to say something that is meaningful and interesting to as many people as possible.

Despite putting myself on a career track that would have consisted primarily of researching and writing texts on some of my favorite works of literature, plus a healthy dose of teaching those works to presumably appreciative (read: awake) students, my graduate work -- and the prospect of an academic career in general -- has stifled my creativity. This is not a new revelation, as I've proved herein time and time again. But I've been trying very hard to rationalize how it is that a life of writing (albeit academic writing) could be so incurably detrimental to, well, my (creative) writing -- of which this blog is included.

It's equally unsurprising that I've felt both pain and pity over the jettisoning of my blogging during times of great stress. Quoth the author, from an ill-conceived draft, begun over a month ago, that shall hereafter never see the light of day:

I had every intention of taking the clichéd resolution approach to blogging, embracing the turning of the calendar as an excuse to turn a new leaf and start fresh and set myself to a particular (and particularly stringent) schedule and yada yada yada. I should have known that my resolve would quickly be shattered when, on New Year's Eve, I fashioned an idea for a blog entry about how my world would be transformed in 2009, as a direct result of jettisoning the poor karma and horrid fortunes that 2008 brought me. I took this idea -- which I'd fomented through judicious bouts of sitting at the computer, staring at the blinking caret, ready to rock -- and proceeding to shelve it, thinking, Meh, I'm not in the mood right now. I can write it later.

And now, as you have seen, a month later, that very promising post has been unceremoniously relegated to a relatively uninteresting vignette meant only to serve as a passable but by no means notable way of entering my latest entry. Poor little misbegotten post. You never really stood a chance, did you?

And, as it turned out, neither did that draft. That to me is fucked up. But then, it's always harder to work on things that need be done than on things that want to be done.

But rather than go down that same, tired path in this missive, I want to tie it into my aforementioned eagle. It would seem that today, of all days, my mind was tuned in enough to receive even the simplest of inspirations. Whether the result of ennui, impatience, or the malaise of indifference that has as of late characterized my participation in seminar, something in my crazy head was crying out for some meaningful stimulus. And there, miraculously, it was!

What I have to wonder, however, is if it's really so miraculous. It strikes me that these kinds of things happen on an almost everyday basis. And if you, like me, have the kind of mind that's wired to the type of detail that you feel strongly compelled to examine in all its glorious minutiae, then you understand that it's actually a natural, organic, and surprisingly regular occurrence. Sure, in our daily doldrums, we often miss the "little things" that those with an surplus of clever ideas (and often, consequently, a dearth of attentive ears -- and yes, I know how damnably close to self-description this veers) cry desperately for us to awaken and discover. Yet those are the very same things I've been neglecting to the degree that their reemergence takes on almost religious significance.

I know what you're wondering. What if I'm not a creative-minded person? What if these things genuinely just have no impact on my life? Why should I care?

I want to posit that it matters because there's so much negative stigma associated with the simple things that they're so easy to lose sight of. And while it's true that our world has a depth of complexity so vast that it makes the mini-verse of Lost pale in comparison, why do we have to feel so bad about noticing the spare, glorious details of life? What's wrong with taking the time to savor the beauty in a small, plain thing? Or in enjoying a diversionary task that will not make you any more productive but might, in the short run, make you less likely to snap under the pressure of excruciating reality? Why do we too often need to reach that brink before the simple joys made themselves apparent?

If I long to be a writer, I understand that I will need to make myself available to these opportunities more often. And it's comforting to know that, as I near the end of the trial that has been my graduate work, my senses appear to be reawakening to the possibilities around them. I can only hope that, when all is said and done, I shall, like my precious eagle, find myself able to not only be seen but to soar.