2004-11-23 - 9:40 a.m.
feel free to make "way to go, big brain!" your personal life motto.

so just now i was reading not-a-finger and i started laughing, like, way too loud (LITTLE LEAKS OF PEE is what did me in) for the computer lab ::shhhhhhh:: atmosphere, so i was trying really hard to be quiet but as you all can guess that only made it funnier, and i managed to squeak out a Sorry for the collective benefit of all those inconvenienced by my incessant chortling and gasping and going Tss-tss-tss. then i just started laughing without trying to be polite about it and i couldn't stop until i was safely many, many back-button presses away.

yeah so i have these two papers due today, and there's the one that i will not under any circumstances mention in this diary until well after 3:55 this afternoon because i fucking better have it written by then, and there's the one that i will mention now.

our creative writing class is the fuckin' bombshit. we get to write all the time. and some of us get to be reassured time and again that we're better than everyone else in the room all the time. awesome class. i missed all of last week due to oversleeping, but today i think i'll be on top of it, as far as getting-to-class-on-time goes, because i arrived here at eight:thirty due to various and convoluted circumstances into which we won't delve today unless i get bored.

and there was this paper. the teacher discussed it with us way the hell back in august or september, and it's due today (for the mathematically challenged, that's almost twenty months). we were to read either vonnegut's GALAPAGOS or steinbeck's THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT, and write a criticism of it. but since i'm an idiot, i somehow got it into my head that the choices were GALAPAGOS and steinbeck's TORTILLA FLAT, god knows why, and i decided to read TORTILLA FLAT, of course, and analyze it and understand it and love it and shit, and then i found out that TORTILLA FLAT was not among the books from which we were allowed to choose, so i picked GALAPAGOS. now in the midst of all this madd english class action, i was neglecting to read the book, opting instead to make out with strippers and get high, so last night arrived with me spracked (sprizzacked, my nigga!) outta my gourd and dead exhausted from previous days spent in much the same manner.

groovy.

so i read the book. it takes maybe four hours. and then i write the criticism. or i start to. the thing is, i can't for the life of me remember what exactly i'm supposed to write, so i just kinda... write stuff until i can't think of anything else to write.

the results are phrases like these, which by the way i am reading in order of their appearance in the paper that i'm supposed to turn in today: "yeah, okay, but is it svelte?", "fine, you dumb fuck," "way to go, big brain!", "lurking like a drunken, smelly rapist in the back of my car," "lord knows i love me a hinderance," "oh my god oh my god ohmygodohmygodohmygod here it comes...", "my brain ordained it: it must be so," "but why, goddammit? why?", "boring, gay, stupid facts," "this guy can't write worth shit," "i was ensconced in warm, slightly prickly fascination and woozy with philosophy," "holy shit--i was thinking!", "bullshit, anonymous classmate," "some nebulous, obscure, fuzzy-edged hemming and hawing over things a human being is programmed to never understand (my own personal absolute favorite pastime)", "why, sitting and pondering are the benchmarks of humanity!"

the absolute kicker is the end:

"if i can't know the answers to any of these spooooky questions, what's the point of even having a human brain--just to ponder vague abstractions, and to feel my perplexity sprout a little shoot called frustration, and to feel that frustration bloom into a fullblown angsty Weltanschauung, laced with ennui and apathy, without ever truly knowing their concrete answers?

who the hell knows? great book."

might as well stick on a postscript that reads, "P.S. i'm SO SPRACKED!!!!!!! alalalalalalalala JIHAD!!!"

well fuck, now i am late for class. way to go, big brain!

ooh, you touch my tra-la-la... mmm, my ding-ding-dong