sleepy

It's early, he murmured, and by this he meant, as became immediately apparent, that he still had time to punish himself for his frivolity in having exchanged obligation for devotion, the authentic for the false, the enduring for the transient.

That's from Jose Saramago, a Portugese Nobel laureate from a few years ago. Sadly, despite good intentions, I spent an evening exchanging the authentic for the false--i.e., I caught up on some TV instead of working on my model as I was supposed to.

I wanted to log on somewhere and leave some sort of cutting remark--the online equivalent of opening up a window and shouting at the world. But when everyone from my mom to my future employer has little bots scurrying about the web gathering bits and bytes, a random internet scream seems less relieving than it used to.

Instead, a quote, a musing, and off to bed. To bed I said. Did you know that Dr. Seuss is not pronounced the way we grew up pronouncing it? The correct pronunciation rhymes with voice, not loose. The more you know.... (Also, four periods is the proper way to shorten a sentence with an elipsis while at the same time ending a thought). However, I wonder if putting punctuation outside of "quotation marks", such as the example I just made, applies to thoughts in parens. The fads of punctuation seem quite ephemeral. But I should at least consistently apply that fad. Hopefully I will in the future. And yes, I mean I definitely will do so in a hopeful way, not that I may possibly do so in an adjective-less manner.

I am quite pleased with myself, despite the unbalanced parallelism that I began that last paragraph with. I am not supposed to end with a with, but it sounded more natural than "despite the unbalanced parallelsim with which I began that last paragraph". Perhaps the awkwardness of both constructions indicates that I need to shake things up a bit. "Despite beginning the last paragraph with an unbalanced parallel structure, I am quite please with myself" seems like a better option, but one that clearly shows I rewrote it three times. I guess that is the paradox--writing that looks effortless comes out after the 11th or 12th draft, while effortless writing looks like the 11th or 12th draft of a tortured legal contract. Anything in between is sad. It's sad because a whole generation of know-it-all whipper snappers have tried to emulate skilled writers like Wallace or Eggers and move in and out of different layers of the text, but fail to highlight anything new or different. Instead, they are stuck in endless, selfish recursion.