chapter three: they preferred to remain anonymous

statement of purpose:
although friending people on facebook is arbitrary, the individual facebook page is personal and immediately relevant to its owner. the arbitrarity of interactions on the internet overcomes and eventually squashes any personal relevance which an individual's facebook page might contain. (eventually, you realize that nobody cares that you liked the beatles as a child. they never read the about me paragraph you've stitched together like frankenstein's monster. they just want to write on your wall and look at your pictures and get your phone number to have but never call.) this is the direct antithesis of healthy friendships in the world of mass and volume, which rely on the intimate, interpersonal exchanges which facebook can neither facilitate nor simulate.

hypothesis:
facebook has diluted the meaning of the word "friendship" to such an extent that I can friend everybody with a last name beginning with the letter "A."

procedure:
I began by searching for (in quotes) " A," notice the space before the "A." this would separate everybody with first names that began with "A" from the people I wanted to friend. I made exceptions for people with names like "D'Angelo," or "Van Adler." I friended them too, because they would probably appear on a list of people with last names beginning with the letter "A," which is exactly what I wanted.

I added a lot of Arnold's, Arsenault's and Abbot's. I added a few people with the name "Aa Aa," alhtough I figured this wasn't their real names, but that they preferred to remain anonymous. I friended them because I didn't want to start making exceptions to the rule.

One lady I friended asked me, "hey what's up? :)," to which I replied, "Hi! Not much." then she wrote, "do i know you by any chance?", to which I replied, "I'm afraid not, I'm just friending everybody with a last name beginning with the letter 'A.'" she promptly unfriended me.

four days into the experiment, I got a message while friending people, which informed me that if I kept on like this, my account would be banned. all other friends I'd add would have to verify that we are friends. this was either a challenge to or the end of my career in the field of social commentary.

conclusion:
this is only a little bit poetic.

chapter two: the accidental crushing of important things

thinking of starting a brand new story, completely from scratch, positively original, about a guy who's afraid of going to sleep in his own bed. this is not based exclusively from personal experience, no, as I know of other people who've gone without sleeping in their own beds for much longer stretches of time. maybe he'd be in prison. maybe he'd sleep on the floor for the first couple months, then get beaten up or get so obese off prison fare that he'd have to grudgingly accept the bed as a stubborn fact of his existence, as relentless as the shooting pain in his back, which it would cure in an ironic and climactic and revelatory manner after about five thousand words.

my own sore back is not the single source of this idea, no.

I am looking for a couple of things: a nice, concise prose, maybe as a way to adapt in advance to law school, which I fear will turn into another couple of years spent accidentally crushing important things. another good title for a story: "the accidental crushing of important things."

today I wrote a poem about the midget who could not break those cuffs. a good friend asked me, "How fucked are we?" and I replied, "There are so many layers to that question." it would've taken me a year to list all the reasons. that is one finite answer to that infinite question. and that reflexivity is yet another beating heart of postmodernism, oh so banally waiting for a stake to be driven through it.

chapter one: the gut of a ship

fell asleep this afternoon on the twelfth floor of my library, while reading Eugene Onegin, the Nabokov translation. my intention was to finish one translation, then move on to another translation, and so on, until I achieved a mastery of the form through osmosis. this purpose was complicated by my falling asleep on my Nabokov translation.

I dreamed I was sitting in the hull of an old-fashioned whaling ship, which had been refurbished into a church. (that is much better than a church made into a boat.) my Logic professor began to give a lecture on Jonah and the Whale. I couldn't pay attention, because I was busy swinging on the ropes that hung from the ceiling. everybody was disappointed that I was being so immature at such a critical moment in the lecture.

the symbolism of that, I'll leave to you to fully decode. do I expect lectures to do the work of sermons? why do you need ceiling-mounted ropes in the hull of a ship? was this the moment of clarity about which I was so desperate to explain in an overlong, overwrought freshman novel?

I got bored thinking about that, and went back to reading. it's only ever really good when it's your last remaining option.