bittersweet migraine in my head

my school just did its own little "post secret" thing; I submitted a secret and then, upon reading the others, realized I had several more I wanted to get out there in some way:

- I just don’t get as happy when Evgeni Malkin scores as I do when anybody else on the Penguins scores. Even Gonchar.

- I haven’t been to church yet in Boston, and I feel less guilty about that than about the fact that I don’t really want to go.

- I don’t think the kid I’ve most recently referred to as my best friend is honest with me most of the time, and that makes me really angry. I don't think it'll ever be resolved.

- I want to live in Allston and wear worn-out old clothes and be cool and go to cafes in the morning, and have friends who are in a band with me and make excellent, transcendent music and keep ridiculous hours. The whole experience would give me quite a lot of interesting things to write about.

- I also really want to cover the BU men’s hockey team for the Freep by my junior year. I feel like this and the previous desire are sort of incompatible.

- I don’t want to smoke weed -or anything - at all, but a lot of the people I want to hang out with do.

- Knowing that other people are sad makes me sadder than almost anything.

- I always assume that at least 65% of the world has its shit more together than I do, and that the other 35% are absolute messes.

- I don’t want to live in New York at all anymore. I had thought this might happen upon moving to Boston.

- Even though the year has been an absolute roller coaster so far and I’m still in transition, I think I made a good choice in coming to BU.

- The thought of getting married terrifies the shit out of me. It’s so final. To say nothing of having kids.

- I want to start following baseball intensely this year, but I’m seriously afraid of being exposed by die-hard Sox Nation people as a relative noob.

- I have dreamed about being in Prague on more than one occasion, despite the fact that I’ve never been there. It’s always a little run-down but heartbreakingly beautiful in my dreams. It also rains a lot.

- I hate wearing high heels so much that the thought of it actually makes me angry. And I hate when girls are like “you’re just trying to be overly tomboyish/stubborn/whatever,” no, I am being LOGICAL and pragmatic. They fucking hurt. I do not advocate pain in the name of fashion.

- I could never be a hipster because I love the following things (among others) too much: sports, Bruce Springsteen, Green Day, the Dropkick Murphys, Dunkin Donuts, The Office.

- However, I could probably be mistaken for a hipster due to my love for the following things: Jack Kerouac, cardigans, writing, writing in long rambling sentences with way too many adjectives, vinyl records, big headphones.

can't forget the time or place

this is still one of my favorite playlists I've ever made:

1. "El Scorcho," Weezer
2. "Love You Madly," Cake
3. "Piazza, New York Catcher," Belle and Sebastian
4. "Desire," U2
5. "I Want To Hold Your Hand," The Beatles
6. "I Want To Tell You," The Beatles
7. "I Will Dare," the Replacements
8. "I've Just Seen a Face," Jim Sturgess
9. "Don't Let Me Down," Dana Fuchs and Martin Luther McCoy
10. "California Dreamin'," The Mamas and the Papas
11. "Elevation," U2
12. "Love Today," Mika
13. "Anyone Else But You," the Moldy Peaches
14. "Seasons of Love," Rent


-- July 2008. Washington, DC. in honor of a kid who knew all the same obscure Beatles songs I did, sang Johnny Cash with me at the Vietnam War Memorial, had a man-crush on Bono, was so involved with musicals that I'm still not 100% certain he was straight (boy knew all the words to "Seasons of Love" before I did), and in the end, went home to Los Angeles.

you were a child, crawling on your knees toward it

haha, so. a good friend of mine just reconnected, via Facebook, with this kid we went to camp with...six years ago? has it really only been six years this summer? were we that old? (that young?) he was a cute kid when he was thirteen, anyway. now he's still sort of cute but he looks like kind of a...I don't know the word. kind of potentially tiresome? but maybe not, maybe profile pictures aren't anything to go on, haha. he's a sophomore at IUP, anyway. crazy shit.

I still have the little blue journal at home I took to camp that year, man. that was a good year. I wrote letters back and forth for a couple months after I came home with this kid named Jack from Ohio. we wrote a comic strip together. then it turned out we both sucked at correspondence, and he sent me something like a year later that I kept meaning to respond to and...didn't. fuck, I still feel bad about that sometimes. Jack was a nice kid.

swapping one addiction for another

my soc professor went on a rant about people who are overly zealous and think they know everything about religion one way or another being asshats. it was awesome.


we got over the witches in Salem, MA
we moved on and understood facts of the day
we know what you're saying is simply not true
we've proven we're right about all your gods, too

weird but true: the last time I loved somebody I thought I had a legitimate chance with was over two years ago. (that's not counting the time when the situation might have turned out differently had both of us lived in the same state - strange summer happenings, you know.)
maybe this is why the thought of having a chance scares me out of my mind.

"going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world"

mainly for my own reference, books I have read for the first time in the last year (ish) and thoroughly enjoyed (not including the ones I just sort of liked):

- heart of darkness, joseph conrad (yes, really)
- the things they carried, tim o'brien
- a portrait of the artist as a young man, james joyce (again, yes, really)
- downtown owl, chuck klosterman
- foxfire, joyce carol oates
- state by state: a panoramic portrait of america - various authors, an essay on each state and it's fucking awesome, okay
- heart of a dog, mikhail bulgakov
- wonder boys, michael chabon
- on the road, jack kerouac
- moneyball, michael lewis
- white teeth, zadie smith
- the mysteries of pittsburgh, michael chabon
- eating the dinosaur, chuck klosterman

currently in progress: the dharma bums, jack kerouac, and the mysteries of pittsburgh again because I felt like restarting it yesterday. like i need to miss pittsburgh more. why is nothing capitalized in this post? i don't knoooooooooooow. also, i reread killing yourself to live and love is a mixtape alternately pretty much every time i'm between books. loooove.

"there is not even silence in the mountains, but dry sterile thunder without rain"

so I'm trying to write a paper on The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot (which I'm enjoying probably more than any normal person should) and I kind of want to write about the common themes it shares with Quadrophenia. kdjfasdfasjdfhaskdf why must I be like this?

seriously though. it's mainly the last section of the poem/the last song on the album, and both have this recurring motif of water and rain bringing life, and this sudden climactic thunderstorm at the end - here:

"And upside down in air were towers
Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours
And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.

In this decayed hole among the mountains
In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing
Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel
There is the empty chapel, only the wind's home.
It has no windows, and the door swings,
Dry bones can harm no one.
Only a cock stood on the rooftree
Co co rico co co rico
In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust
Bringing rain"

- the waste land, section five: "what the thunder said"

"Only love
Can bring the rain
That makes you yearn to the sky
Only love
Can bring the rain
That falls like tears from on high

Love, reign o'er me

On the dry and dusty road
The nights we spend apart alone
I need to get back home to cool cool rain
I can't sleep and I lay and I think
The night is hot and black as ink
Oh God, I need a drink of cool, cool rain"

- "love, reign o'er me"

well, now Blogger won't let me get out of italics, which is a pain. but do you see? I wonder if Pete Townshend knew he was evoking one of the most famous works of epic modernist poetry when he wrote this shit.