05.29.2002 – day
originally written 05.29.2002
bright yellow cups of coffee. i’ll find you by hundred reasons playing in my headphones (and beach boys on the cafe sound system – a million times better than brennan’s muzak). the guy with his girlfriend in the corner booth with the thick glasses, dress shirt, and good haircut that makes asia look cool. young parents smiling at their kids in strollers parked beneath the square of bright afternoon sunlight pouring in through thr windows. spiky haired coffee jock behind the counter. girl in the corner chomping on biscotti and reading harry potter. cafe metropol in newington. right around my corner from my flat and i never noticed it before. this city has more little cafes than anywhere i’ve ever lived. and that was honestly, more than anything else, what made me the most jealous when i last visited cambridge, ma. now, my fantasies about college life, and the reality collide for a little while as i pour over computer architecture notes. a seemingly endless string of cafes that makes the few starbucks in the touristy areas almost unnoticeable – this is worlds away from columbus.
speaking of columbus … now i know the problem with campus partners. the problem with osu as a whole. i heard a few weeks ago that the buck-i-mart was shutting down. a real shame. this place was great. basically an on-campus shop-and-rob with cheap, high-quality, bagels and coffee and juice to take the edge off before your first class. but it’s gone. one of the few university-related stores that i frequented, it was right in the heart of the engineering campus, which was great for me (especially during the bliss/hell of cis560). did i mention is was cheap? but it’s gone. i e-mailed someone about it and they said that it was a project that was financially independent (i.e. no university funding), and that it just didn’t turn a profit. fair enough, but it was always busy. it might not have made money, but it was useful to students. all students, from the people who wanted cheap soda, to the students who worked long hours there part-time. now lets talk about a project that isn’t financially independent (i.e. gets boatloads of money from the university). campus partners. read gentrification, read a yuppification, read making the campus area into one gian suv-infested bar and grill strip mall. and the thing about that project, is that it’s not even useful for students. it’s going to clear away housing and raise property values making the shitty housing in the area even more expensive. consider this a further tuition increase that you didn’t expect. and the high-end boutiques and bar and grills that are going to populate the area aren’t going to do me, or a great deal of the student body (not to mention the non-students who live in the area) a bit of good. so, my tuition is going to go to finance something that i neither want, nor agree with, nor will ever use, while the one thing that i do use, doesn’t get any of my money (other than the nearly daily few bucks i spent on bagels and juice) and get shut down.one more nail in the coffin that is osu. one more year … enjoy the kids and the high-level classes and then get the hell out before i end up walking down high street in tears.
watched ghost world last night. amazing movie. i think i liked it even better the second time i saw it. i stopped trying to find symbolism in enid’s departure and ignored the occasional discontinuity of the plot and realized that more than anything that this is a movie about enid and rebecca. two teenage girls that, to me, are more real than any others in modern cinema. watching the dvd extras and reading the comic book, i get the impression that after a point, enid and rebecca started writing ghost world for themselves, with clowes just going along for the ride, sketching the background from scenes from his neighborhood while the girls set the plot in the foreground. i think enid is such an amazing and endearing character. this is perhaps because i’ve known so many girls like her. complex, akward, bouncing between moments of sincere kindness and absolute cruelty, but never really fitting into either role. completely uncomfortable even in their own skins, not really weak or vulnerable in the traditional sense of the word, but completely unable to play the role in which they were cast in life. amazing stuff. the movie is really sad in a way, but it makes me happy in the way that i am every time i see something in the media that reflects my reality. oh yeah. clowes totally looks like george clooney.
for the first time in my life, i’m wearing name-brand socks. i’ve got these sweet vans numbers that i had to borrow from iain since the dryer downstairs was broken. admitedly i had my eyes set on the volcom ones, but i’ll take what i can get.
iain seems set on making my bedroom door look totally whack. first it was the jonathan davis poster where he looks half satanist/half child molester, and then it was a poster of the strokes just looking stupid. note to anyone reading this who likes the strokes. i have a great pair of blue jeans with lots of holes in them that i would be willing to sell you for a couple of hundred bucks. they look exactly like the ones in the poserster. they’re real cool. iain did give me a very rad arto saari poster to grace my walls however. cheers.
watched oz for the first time last night. it’s this show all about prison life. the prison bitches, and gangsters seem sort of cliched, but it was still pretty good. the thing i like about a good prison drama, is that it forces you to identify with characters who are all, to some degree, bad people (they’re in the clink). there’s no pure hero or villain, so the whole anti-hero thing works considerably better than in other settings. between that and the sopranos, it makes me want hbo something fierce. the show was good because you could just get into it from the start, even without knowing all the characters or plotlines. also, what i found interesting, is that every once and a while, you have this mumia-esque guy quoting prison statistics. surprisingly anti-prison-industrial complex.
flatmate marco is so fscked. he was supposed to do his folder which represents his organization for his teaching placement today at noon. he didn’t hand it in. the thing is, it was already late. this could be bad for him. i told him he should just go in and give a big speech about how educating teachers has gotten far away from what’s important, etc, etc. but, in all seriousness, i think that it’s slightly scary that marco’s going to be teaching kids. a good guy, but needs to get the whole grin-and-bear-it responsibility thing down. then again, it’s sort of surprising that they have 1st year students student-teaching. i’ll agree that so much of teachers’ education seems to be crap. what i think it is, is that they have a bit of chip on their shoulder because of the general perception of teaching being an easy profession in society. so the university people have to compensate by adding a bunch of superfluous stuff to the curriculum.
the university main library is so beautiful. lots of windows overlooking the meadows on one side and underlooking (is that a word?) the salisburry crags framed by rows of stone-faced tenements.
oh my god. bright eyes is crazy. almost a farce of emo-ness:
“we trade liquor for blood, in an attempt to tip the scales. i think you lost what you loved, in that mess of details. they seem so important at the time, now you can’t even recall any names, faces, or lines. it’s more the feeling of it all. winter’s going to end i’m going to clean these veins again, so close to dying that i finally can start living …”
maybe i’d be this tortured if i grew up in nebraska too. actually, i’d probably be happy if timothy’s (study abroad kid, not brother) post-industrial city = awesome independent music scene theory holds true. at least i read somewhere that he makes up most of his characters. the calendar hung itself … is another seething, messy, emotional track that i still really like. it reminds me of fellow nebraskans the faint, or maybe the faint reminds me of this. kicks it up a notch over carrabba even. when does catharsis become self-indulgence or vanity? the (mock?) radio interview at the end of an attempt to tip the scales is a great contextualization for the record that is completely missing on a lot of recordings of this nature. cheers to tim for hooking me up with the record. he also hooked me up with a record by a band called the natural history who sound like a basic garagey rock band. not too bad. i think he said that they opened for enon when he saw them in columbus. the record’s not bad.
tim also hooked me up with education for death, a disney cartoon which is some interesting cartoon anti-nazi propaganda (perhaps most interesting given some of walt’s political inclinations). it basically tells the story of a young german youth raised and brainwashed into a nazi monstrosity. the best imagery in the film is the image of a goofball hitler pressing his head between the breasts of a freakishly rotund frauline. crazy. also interesting is the amount of dialogue in this film that is actually in german (or at least i think it is – i’m not a german speaker). i imagine that they use the untransalted dialogue to make the antagonists seem even more foreign and frightening.