Trying This One More Time

So things are going pretty well.

Last night, I went with Jinx to Dog Day Afternoon, a low-key movie about a bank robbery in the seventies. It was good; I especially liked the distance the director (or writer, I suppose) put between the characters and the audience -you couldn't completely sympathize with any of the main characters, no one was 'right', as is the case in so many films today. And Al Pacino's wife… I didn't see that coming.

Then it was off to The Rocky Horror Picture Show, a Y.U.A.I presentation. Since I was a Rocky Horry virgin, The Hedonists forced me to imitate an orgasmic hamster. My team won second place, and I got to go sit down. With the exception of Jonas, there wasn't a single non-republican in my entire row. We danced the Time Warp of the Midwestern conservative.

I sat next to K. Elizabeth Bates, Lawrence's female Republican. She's in my "Milton and the 17th Century" English class (I'd forgotten how good Areopagitica is) and, since we also work together, we usually spend Friday afternoons talking about Milton and other English-related subjects.

Yesterday, she mentioned that she keeps a private journal, one with the rare distinction of actually being as private as a journal is supposed to be. Knowing that another English major is writing, in order to improve her writing, convinced me that I need to start, which is probably why I'm posting a new blog. It's the kind of passive competition that got me through high school -I can't wait for next term, when we have "Literary composition: Fiction" together.

This term is going well, though. I finished an East Asian Classics Midterm (some would say the East Asian Classics Midterm) a few minutes before it was due, cramming several ideas into one haphazard concluding paragraph. Likewise, I've done every Geology Lab during my pre-class lunchbreak, and I finished a 7-8 page paper on Marvell last week in near-record time. I'm not learning any lessons about procrastination, but I've certainly become a successful procrastinist.

My newest time-waster: Timesplitters 2, Jonas' new GameCube game. It reminds me of Goldeneye, and, best of all, it has features to unlock. I love playing a video game if I know that I'm unlocking cheats and characters and multiplayer levels, because then I know I'm working for the public good. I know when to stop playing, but I definitely don't know when not to start.

Last Tuesday Ann and Jonas and I went to a Dashboard Confessional concert (my third concert ever) at the Riverside Ballroom in Green Bay. It was fun, but I lost a lot of respect for Dashboard, a band I that I'd already packed away in a mental box labeled "last year's soundtrack: angst."

It was a critical blow, seeing the various types of emo fan (the idealistic emo couples, the angsty loners, the isolated groups of 9th-grade girls with The Strokes shirts), not to mention The Vain Man, that dastard who lived down the hall from me last year. Whenever I see people with him I want to grab them by the shoulders and just shake them until they understand what I could never articulate.

Worse than seeing my musical brethren was seeing how at odds the lyrics to early Dashboard songs are with the image Dashboard (at the insistence of the label, I'm sure) is cultivating. These aren't lonely teenagers; I doubt they ever had the kind of problems they sing about. I don't think I'll go to another Dashboard concert; I might as well watch them on MTV.

There. I think Jonas is waking up, so I'm going to get an early start on wasting my time. Maybe I'll put more thought and less summary into my next blog, but in any case, later.