Today I said to my mother:

Enough is enough
I think that any logical argument more than seven sentences (like philosophy) is a giant shapeless blob and everyone I talk to tries to shape it into things based on their life priorities.
I am tired of this blob and its shapelessness and I would not like to shape him into anything.
And I have no life prior-ities. I only have life next-ities.
For example I would next like to eat breakfast.
Or I would next like to sit over there.
Or if it is a hot day, I would next like to be colder.

My mom said then:
Did you leave something on the stove? I can smell fire

I am listening to the news on the radio right now.
For the past twenty minutes it has been about Facebook joining the stock market.

Of the many thoughts Facebook inspires me to think, here is the worst one:

Why of all things is it the face I have to look at of a person?
Why not their elbows. What if I lived in a world where everyone peered at each others elbows during a conversation?
And then humans would have evolved to deduce each other’s dispositions from the way their elbows looked, instead of their faces.
And then maybe things would be better, and people wouldn’t quarrel and kill each other

Its a shame that I can’t ask Barbara (the radio anchor, with whom I by now feel a jovial familiarity) about this

Barbara can’t hear my thoughts.
She is now speaking about a girl in Georgia who has lost her hands to a flesh-eating virus.
I can’t eat these Oreos anymore

Nevermind. I can still eat more Oreos.
Stories that are difficult to stomach never bring me difficulty stomaching anything.
In other words, I can always continue to eat even in the face of shock or disgust or crippling despair.

In fact, I can eat even more during crippling despair.
One time I found out I had missed a very important important deadline
and then I mistakenly ate an entire loaf of Ekmek next to my nightstand.
Ekmek means bread in Turkish.

A few weeks ago, my days were becoming too hectic.
So on the Thursday before my graduation, I decided to stay home and spend the night meditating in silence.
But somehow I still found myself, an hour before sunrise, in the attic of the English House listening to a five-person jam session with two remaining friends who weren’t lost in some unknown corner.

But now my days are the opposite. My days are now so un-drastic that I’m worried I might forget who I am.

Today for example, I woke up at 8:30 as usual in my checkered sleeping shorts and went downstairs and ate a cupcake.
Then I thought: Perhaps I shouldn’t eat cake at breakfast-time.

That is exactly what I did yesterday morning, and Friday morning, and Thursday morning also.

Not once did I even read the newspaper or wonder how the Kenyan’s were doing.

In fact the strongest opinion I had today was when I was driving home from the gym at 3 in the afternoon and noticed that the shopping complex near my house is named “Riverside Plaza” in green italicized letters.

There is no rivers here! I wondered indignantly. Why does it say Riverside Plaza, over there, in those green italicized letters? Am I supposed to be too dumb to notice that there’s actually not even a stream, or even an estuary near here? Is the green italicized font supposed to represent a sensitivity towards nature? Did the developers consider my silly suburban existence when they wrote that and then chuckle at my expense?

After that I drove home and my dad told me to water the pomegranate tree.

Today is my graduation from college and stuff
My parents forgot so they held a dinner party today that I have to attend.

So now I am at home trying to avoid windexing the windows before any guests arrive
I hate windexing windows
Sometimes I think that if I wander around intently holding a coffee mug maybe no one will notice that I’m not helping the preparations
Then no one will interrupt me to ask me to windex the windows

Its 2:30 AM now. Only Won and me are left in the deep depths of the CISE building still studying for number theory.

If I fail this exam I may not be able to graduate.

Considering this predicament, I am lying down on the conference table to try to direct blood flow to my brain.

I look at Won. He is furrowing his eyebrows while looking sideways at the white board.

If Won fails he will lose probation and have to move back to Korea to complete his military service.
I wonder if Won is worried.
I’d switch places with Won if he wonted me to.

It would be sort of like a Tale of Two Cities
except that Won would be facing military service in Korea instead of being beheaded by the guillotine for the crimes of his forefathers
and I would be like Sydney Carton except that I am not in love with Won’s wife

Won has turned around

“Can you explain number 29″ he is saying

How can Won ask such petty questions in these grave times

I’d like to stand there, or walk there, or wake up in the morning (there).

The more time I spend encountering new and interesting things the less time I spend making anything new or interesting. Likewise, the reverse of that statement. I dunno which one is more important and so I’ve accidentally resorted to doing neither

One evening at Maude’s cafe I was watching Oddnon play chess with Ross when I saw Apples to Apples sitting on the third shelf from the bottom of the board game cupboard.

I hate Apples to Apples I thought therein

Firstly, no one knows why the game was invented. Chess was invented to conquer opposing kingdoms, and monopoly was invented to conquer your contemporaries and force them into poverty through heavy taxes.

Apples to Apples has nothing to conquer. Instead all of the players are forced to pick the worst pairs of words that they can, hoping that their particular combination of words will be found funniest.

This is dumb because shock value is a primitive and overwhelmingly inelastic source of humor. Why is the response “Gregarious Hitler” funnier or not funnier than “Portly Mahtama Ghandi”? Has anybody a single good reason?!

There probably are no good reasons.
As far as I can tell, the entire game is spent in a confounding struggle to be more hilarious than each other by picking increasingly absurd nouns or adjectives. You would think that such a stupid game would immediately cease to be played, but during the whole game, everyone is too preoccupied evaluating their own sense of humor to notice how boring the game has become.

Apples to Apples is dumb in the same sort of way that dinner parties and debutante balls are disgruntling. No one has any fun and everyone is confused and all of the humans in attendance spend the whole time refining their own social characteristics.

Today Debbie asked me “Where is northeast?”
Northeast is northeast is northeast is..

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Oh, I think I have figured out one of my life’s greatest problems.
What if your eyebrows don’t travel far enough around your face to accurately express your emotions. If I feel very worried, deeply thoughtful, or simply indifferent, it doesn’t matter which one, my eyebrows still always only express moderate frustration.
What do I do

Last Friday early in the morning, on a foggy, windswept day, I was on a very long drive with 3 strange strangers.
One was a 21 year old girl, one was a 22 year old girl, and one was a 26 year old man.

That reminds me, if someone is 21 years old are they a girl or a woman? I dunno

Girls just don’t like it very much to be called women. No one knows why, and I really don’t know either.
I think it is because the word woman has too many negative connotations. First of all, it makes you sound like you have to be attending to grave matters all the time, such as fighting for suffrage, or putting coals on a stove, or that you’re on the verge of maternity. It also makes you feel wider and more heavy-set when you are called a woman.
No one likes to feel those things, because wide and heavy-set and womanly people are always slower, more dispensable, and less central to any action-filled scenario. I don’t think it ought to be perceived that way (for example, Benjamin Franklin was wide, heavy-set and womanly), but that’s what everyone thinks.
This is why, to be polite, I try to refer to women as girls, so as not to accidentally evoke those grave emotions in them.

Anyway, back to those strangers. I kept wondering what music I should play for them in my car.
So instead of sleeping the night before, I had spent long hours selecting music that was very good and impressive.
To my disappointment, no one noticed.
One time the 26 year old man said:
“boy, your music sure has no words”

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I was looking through my camera for a good picture of last weekend and the closest I found was this picture of a man with green shorts standing in a tree