the diary of antoine roquentin

It’s pitch black. I’m 30,000 feet in the air. Blasting Memory Tapes.

On my way back to New York—the flight is less than two hours, but going the opposite way felt longer since we had to wait forever to take off from LaGuardia on Friday.

It’s odd—on Google Maps it labels LaGuardia “Flushing Airport.” WTF? I mean, I know it’s located in Flushing, but that’s a Google fail.

I have a paper due tomorrow that I’m not happy with and I think has a ton of flaws. I also have a bunch of news items that I should have finished yesterday, but without wi-fi at Josh’s theatre I couldn’t be very productive.

There’s also the meeting for choosing roommates for next semester at the university. I feel overwhelmed, but not terribly. I know I’ll finish the paper, and even if it isn’t a tour de force that I’ll get a good grade on it.

I don’t think I have much else in the works, save for my Grammar and Style test on Wednesday. I need to read that packet she handed out a few weeks ago. Mrs. Deakins’ tests are comprehensive, to say the least.

Although it wasn’t jam-packed with activities (we didn’t really do much of anything save for watch Star Trek on my laptop in the hotel room), my visit to Illinois was a good diversion. Despite technically being an exurb of Chicago, the town was desolate. Chain restaurants followed me. There was even a Chipotle.

I missed my organic vegan pan-asian macrobiotic cuisine terribly, after two days subsisting on Subway and diner food. Give me Souen or give me death.

However, I did happen upon a Denny’s, which I hadn’t been to in years. I remember all the times Kelly and Christen and I would go to Denny’s (and Mel’s). It was almost sad to know that all of that is gone. Well, not all. I can’t wait to see Christen. It feels like death to know that I haven’t seen her in almost a year. Only three more months.

I picked up an Economist at a newsstand at the airport (my subscription has expired and I don’t really have the money to continue it) and delved into the article on the actual healthcare bill that passed. After all the waffling about what should be in the actual bill, it actually does accomplish a number of important objectives: eliminates “preexisting condition” crap (in 2014), makes it so children can stay on their parents’ plans until they are 26, and mandates insurance for everyone. The troubling thing is that there really is not much of an attempt to control costs, but since that seems to be the only thing that the Democrats and Republicans agree on, a subsequent bill can address that.

Damn. They just told us to turn off electronic devices.

Categories: Ennui

I think I realize what I was trying to get at in my last post.

Insomnia.

It’s 5 AM here now, which is the worst time for me. I wish I could sleep, but I just can’t. I laid down for 30 minutes, and it just didn’t happen. I need to go back to my old regimen of not eating after midnight and trying to get up at the same time each day.

That’s not really it… I could’ve gone to sleep earlier but I had to do this project for my friend. Work keeps me awake too. I just can’t peel myself away from the Internet most of the time. I need to stop this and do some real reading: I have a stack of New Yorkers two inches high.

I think I’m just mad that I have to go fix my aunt’s computer tomorrow. That’s going end up being two days of round-the-clock work (which will cost me two full days of pay) supervising the kids and such (which is fun, but I’m losing a ton of money doing it). Fuck it, I’m fixing the computer and then I’m out of there the next morning. I love my family, but I’ve got to pay the bills. And I’m spending money much faster than I’m making it these days.

I’m re-installing MacSpeech Dictate right now. It has been slow as molasses lately, and this annoying problem where it switches the last two letters in words is so damn annoying—I can’t do any editing to make my sentences sound more natural when I have to be on the hunt for those syntactic bungles.

Okay, the reinstall is complete. And it’s still Inverting the last two letters of anything I type. Maybe I need to create a new profile? okay, new profile completino complete. It’s still doing ti. I don’t even care to fix it anymoer.

Okay, I’ve discovered that it only does this when I’m dictating directly into Chrome. Well, I better put a stop to that. I guess it’s good that I did a reinstall anyway, the software was getting so bloated and slow. I remember when I was using Dragon NaturallySpeaking with my old microphone I used to get so involved in what I was dictating that I would pace around the room in a sort of fervent trance.

It was a wonderful luxury to be able to dictate whatever I wanted when I was at home. Now three days a week I’m with those idiots and their gangsta rap music.

Insomnia. I was going to talk about insomnia. I think that my most poignant posts were always one I absolutely couldn’t sleep and was obsessed with discovering truth. Some kind of truth… I don’t know if the me of those years even knew. These days, I feel like I’ve given up my commitment to capital-t Truth. A few days ago I went back and flipped through some of my older posts. I wasn’t quite sure what I would find, but I didn’t quite like the writing style.

I looked at some from 2008, and although the writing style seems very similar to how I write now I just couldn’t relate to all of these things that I cared about. The desperate grind to get all my work done… my endless math classes that year. Now it all just seems like a joke. My life in California seems less than real, just as my looming existence in New York seemed nothing but a vesper back then.

Besides waxing prosaic about my life, this journal serves as a sort of auxiliary memory, since I can never remember anything about my life. I’m jumping around and I happened upon the post where I listed everyone I’d ever slept with.

I’m lonely in my big bed with my fluffy comforter.
It’s 4 a.m.

It’s been many years but that always stays the same. I suppose I’ve also built a lot of my identity around my insomnia. I remember all those nights where I would be driving my Vespa back home at two o’clock in the morning and loving it. My favorite thing was to take a 3 a.m. drive down Fair Oaks Blvd on a hot summer night. I felt like I was a member of a clan of people that saw the city when it was dead and were uniquely prepared in case something went down in those dying hours.

I remember the thrill of getting home and writing about some amazing event. But as I said before, twitter has for the most part destroyed my absolute need to write something out in prose as soon as I get home.

Instead of this it would be one twitter post of “Just got into a car-crash with some Jehovah’s witnesses! In the ambulance now!”

As much as I glorify my insomnia, it’s this never-ending curse. I can’t work a single week full-time because I can’t get up in the morning and I can’t work all the way through the day. If I do work a full eight hours a start at 2 PM and then by the time I’m done I’m so worked up on caffeine that I really can’t get to sleep at a reasonable hour.

I feel like I accomplished everything and nothing today. I spent hours cleaning all the papers off of my desk that had accumulated in the past few months. I also cleaned off the big table downstairs loaded with all of my unopened letters, unread magazines, and castoff papers from school.

But still, I didn’t do anything that I could actually be paid money for. True, I guess I did work on Josh’s site for a little bit, but that’s because I’ve been putting off doing that for ages.

I have the distinct feeling that by the end of the break I will have done no work either on my papers or for the office. Going to Gail’s always wastes three days or more. I’m going to bring my bike, and when I’m done I’m riding back to the train station and going straight home. I wanted to see Matt today, not waste my morning on the hellish orgy of Hudson-Bergen light rail, PATH, and NJT rail.

I’ve always said that New Jersey should be evacuated and turned into a museum for bad urban planning.

Now it’s six o’clock in the morning. For what it’s worth, I’m going to say that the reinstall really helped my dictation software. Everything appears almost instantly and with very good accuracy. The program even crashed and it kept my document saved somehow.

I can hear my family upstairs. My mom is getting ready for work. If I went upstairs, there would probably be fresh coffee brewed. At this hour I don’t think there’s even a point to going to sleep. Wow! The first yawn of the night, and at 6 AM!

I think my alarm is still set for 10 o’clock in the morning. What a joke. The real tragedy is if I actually do get up in the morning then I’m just too tired to do anything and make all sorts of mistakes. I just need to not get into this habit again.

No food after midnight. Computer gets turned off at 2 AM. Enough of this.

Categories: Ennui

Let’s get the obligatory concert shots out of the way. I apologize for the haphazardness of this post, but it’s two weeks jammed together.

ACRYLICS @ MERCURY LOUNGE

I guess the last time I wrote was after the funeral. I’m still not sure how to put that behind me.

I haven’t really been doing much more than usual, other than going to the university pool a few times this week. Also, my voice recognition software is getting more and more unreliable. It randomly inverts the last two letters of any word it transcribes. I’m just going to roll with it.

Tonight is the first night that I’ve been at home in what seems like forever. It’s so quiet here that all of my thoughts have a certain sheen to them. I wish they were in higher resolution.

I think I’m just feeling depressed because I read the end of House of Mirth and it’s an ending of absolute despair. I’m also in my abode and it’s overflowing with papers and tickets and magazines and envelopes that I have to go through this week, and the painting that I still have to finish for Matt (it was supposed to be a Valentine’s Day gift).

That’s not to say I haven’t been doing anything fun. On the contrary, I saw Neon Indian on Friday of last week after my Aunt Anna’s 97th birthday party!

At the venue, I ran into the lead guy (the band is really only him) and he cut in front of me to use the bathroom. I thought it was pretty funny. There were these crazy drunk girls on acid in front of us who couldn’t have been a day over 16, but they were absolutely enamored with the band and made it a much more fun show.

The IFC Center is doing this program of Beigelow vs. Cameron midnight movies, so Matt, Yevgeny, and I went to see The Abyss on Saturday. It was the first time that I was introducing them to each other, but they got on very well. We had dinner at French Roast before the show, which was delicious. I actually hadn’t seen the movie all the way through, and it was beautiful (especially on the big screen).

Sunday I’d been looking forward to for weeks: it was the Washed Out show at Mercury Lounge. However, the day of the show I wasn’t really feeling it. The Washed Out EPs that I’d been listening to nonstop a few weeks ago were feeling tired. I had looked forward to it too long to actually not go, but my excitement was renewed at the very first song. One, the Washed Out guy is ccuuute as fuck. Two, that type of dreamy, gritty pop really excels in a tiny venue. Three, the audience was loving it and I couldn’t help be swept away by their enthusiasm as well as my own. My pictures didn’t come out, but I have video:

“Belong”

“New Theory” (probably my favorite Washed Out song)

“Hold Out”

This week my social calendar isn’t as jam-packed. Tonight Yevgeny and I went to see this silent Gary Cooper movie on loan from the Library of Congress (this is the only print extant) called Wolfsong. I met up with him an hour or so before the movie and we got some cake and coffee at this little bakery on Bleecker. The movie was actually pretty cute, although a bit implausible. Since it was silent, this man played this piano score that he had written specifically to accompany the events onscreen through the entire film. It was a wonderful piece, so much so that I was almost shocked at the end of the performance when the announcer said that it had been composed specifically for that viewing.

I always feel as if someone I personally know has died once one of my favorite characters die in a novel. I felt like Lily Bart (of House of Mirth, which I finished a few hours ago waiting for the bus) was my secret accomplice, peeking into the indelicacies of Fifth Avenue magnates. Now, she is almost a pathetic character, destroyed by her hubris.

Inherited tendencies had combined with early training to make her the highly specialized product she was: an organism as helpless out of its narrow range as the sea-anemone torn from the rock. She had been fashioned to adorn and delight; to what other end does nature round the rose-leaf and paint the humming-bird’s breast? And was it her fault that the purely decorative mission is less easily and harmoniously fulfilled among social beings than in the world of nature? That it is apt to be hampered by material necessities or complicated by moral scruples?

I am to write a Marxist critique of the book, but that must take a back seat to the largest of the papers that I will be working on this spring break: a six-page opus on Emily Dickinson. I went out and bought her collected poems yesterday at the Union Square Barnes & Noble and headed down for a quick coffee and study session at Think. I feel like I’ve been going at a breakneck pace these last few weeks and I just need to spend some time at home: clean off my desk, answer some of my letters, finally get that second bookshelf so I can get rid of the stacks of books all over the floor.

Tonight I’m devoting to relaxation, after all of the tedious work I did today. Oh! How wonderful, I have my Critical Writing book. I left it here by mistake last week, but now it’s perfect because I can use it for my paper.

I have three due.

6 pages – Emily Dickinson
2 pages – House of Mirth
4 pages – (but doesn’t have to be “done” on Monday) Critical Writing [on climate change]

I need to dump all the photos off my camera and upload them (I have pictures of countless shows on there) but I’ll do it tomorrow.

I’m taking my GRE on Saturday. I’m not really prepared, but I’m not sure what I would do to “prepare,” since it’s supposed to test analytical thinking. Right? I think my nervousness will probably bring me to check out some test prep books at B&N tomorrow.

Also on Saturday I’m going to a this cocktail party/tour of the new exhibit at the New Museum for Contemporary Art. The New Yorker has an interesting take on the show.

I can’t wait until school is over and I can get back to pleasure reading. Notable books on my queue that are waiting patiently on my shelf:

Marcel Proust – Schwann’s Way (the first book in In Search of Lost Time / Remembrance of Things Past)
Roland Barthes – S/Z
Jean Baudrillard – The Intelligence of Evil (Or the Lucidity Pact)
Roland Barthes – Mythologies
Jorge Luis Borges – Collected Works (I’m 2/3 done with this, he’s one of my favorite writers these days)
Edwin A. Abbott – Flatland

And, of course, Amy Hempel’s Collected Stories. They are almost so beautiful I can’t bring myself to read more than a few at a time.

Categories: Ennui