UofM’s #1 Fan
These only get better and better. Can’t wait for football to start.
Random Alonetime Thoughts
- There’s little I enjoy more than a nighttime stroll through a new city. The very best way to grok its character.
- Whenever I finish a good book, I’m left with a void that can only be filled with time or more reading. After Fortress of Solitude, I needed another read. So, I went to the Harvard Book Store and perused the shelves, the pressure on due to parking Nazis. Nothing looked particularly great so I figured I couldn’t go wrong with one picked at random. I closed my eyes and grabbed some crap called Bicycle Days or something. I’ve only read 15 pages but it’s going in the trash. Point being, I need an iphone so I can get delicious anywhere.
- Why do beautiful girls feel the need to move to the big city?
- People in Cambridge are mysterious in ways people in Kalamazoo could never be. Someone I don’t know here could be going to Harvard/MIT or working for one of the many extremely high tech companies in the area, whereas someone I don’t know in Kalamazoo is probably struggling to get their Philosophy degree from Western.
- Sung Tongs gets better/worse with every listen.
- The Olympics have been fantastic.
- Dash is an underused word.
- Pole vaulters may be hotter than either softball or beach volleyball players.
- North Manitou Island is going to be ridiculous. Ly Awesome. Shipwrecks and whiskey.
SURVIVING YOUR TWENTIES
“They call it the “quarter-life crisis.” It is when you stop going along with the crowd and start realizing that there are many things about yourself that you didn’t know and may not like. You start feeling insecure and wonder where you will be in a year or two, but then get scared because you barely know where you are now. You start realizing that people are selfish and that, maybe, those friends that you thought you were so close to aren’t exactly the greatest people you have ever met, and the people you have lost touch with are some of the most important ones. What you don’t recognize is that they are realizing that too, and aren’t really cold, catty, mean, or insincere, but that they are just as confused as you. You look at your job… and it is not even close to what you thought you would be doing, or maybe you are looking for a job and realizing you are going to have to start at the bottom and that scares you. Your opinions have gotten stronger. You see what others are doing and find yourself judging more than usual because you suddenly realize that you have certain boundaries in your life and are constantly adding things to your list of what is acceptable and what isn’t. One minute, you are insecure and then the next, secure. You laugh and cry with the greatest force of your life. You feel alone and scared and confused. Suddenly, change is the enemy and you try and cling on to the past for dear life, but soon realize that the past is drifting further and further away, and there is nothing to do but stay where you are or move forward. You get your heart broken and wonder how someone you loved could do such damage to you. Or you lie in bed and wonder why you can’t meet anyone decent enough that you want to get to know better. Getting wasted and acting like an idiot starts to look pathetic. You go through the same emotions and questions over and over because you cannot seem to make a decision. You worry about loans, money, the future, and making a life for yourself… and while winning the race would be great, right now you’d just like to be a contender. What you may not realize is that everyone reading this relates to it. We are in our best of times and our worst of times, trying as hard as we can to figure this whole thing out. And really, this is an acknowledment that you are not alone in this….. “
This is why I really love Tumblr (at times).
Five Smartest People I Know
Intelligence is hard to judge. Without an IQ test, eloquence, experience, luck, diplomas, a solid memory, or even silence can be confused for smarts. Despite that, here’s the five smartest people I’ve met:
- My Father
- Old Boss
- NL
- LN
- TA
I doubt I remember the obscured names in a couple years.
Old dude going on about exponential growth concerning resource usage, etc. Yes, scary numbers. Another scary number: Michigan lost 30,000 residents last year. I’m sure they’ve lost more this year. Exponential loss?
“ In the end, it was the Sunday afternoons he couldn’t cope with, and that terrible listlessness that starts to set in about 2:55, when you know you’ve taken all the baths that you can usefully take that day, that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the newspaper you will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o’clock, and you will enter the long dark teatime of the soul.
Douglas Adams in one of those Hitchhiker books
Of the twenty things I had planned to get done before my trip to Boston followed immediately by a backpacking trip up north, I’ve accomplished two. Sigh.
“ One of the things I have learned in the last few years is that I am malnourished if I am only reading stuff that everyone is talking about. I begin to feel that I am reading only as part of participant in a community. What I want, what I need desperately is the occult intimate act that I was talking about before. I am trying to reproduce the quality of reading when I was a teenager and had no knowledge of the conversation. I never read a review, I had no idea who was alive or dead or in print or out of print. I grabbed the book and the relationship was absolutely private and complete. So I read obscure and out-of-fashion writers to reconfigure that childhood relationship to the book.
Jonathan Lethem - link
Alright, maybe it’s the current Olympics fever coming over me, or because I slept past 10:00 for the first time in weeks, but the new commercial for Chicago’s candidacy to host the 2016 Olympics is really, really good.
Just finished Lethem’s Fortress of Solitude. It has taken me a good month to get through. Parts of the book are brilliant, especially those describing coming of age that even this dirt road-raised boy can relate to. The one big thing I wonder is how much of it was fictionalized from Lethem’s own life. Is there a real life Mingus? Is he still haunted by stupid ‘yokes’? Did he grow up to be as detestable a person as Dylan did? Did he ever share any joy with his father? It makes a difference for me because it carries less weight if it all really happened.
I remember hearing this song for the first time in the back of my sister’s car on the way to school. 10 freaking years ago.