Today being my 23rd birthday, for which i am doing very little in celebration due to mild depression and general lack of contact with the world outside my parents' apartment, i thought it might be appropriate to initiate my first substantiative post here in quite some time. I'm feeling, as i noted above pretty depressed and lonely, and reading "Retort's" (post)situationist look at the politics of spectacle and what David White so arrogantly termed the world of September 11th people in the most recent New Left Review has perhaps introduced a meditation on the politics of boredom, work and joblessness, privilege, and, yes, spectacle, to my frustrations.



I have what may or may not be an interview for what may or may not be a paying job on wednesday. the organization in question is a workers' center for taxi drivers in new york city. I am hoping it works out.



Wandering broadway today (after lunch with my dad i walked four miles by myself) i saw the person from my high school class whom i used to (somewhat) jokingly describe as my "nemesis." I recognized his face, which still elicits this shock of revulsion and anger from me from all the terrible things i associated him with in high school and all of my fears that i was or would become just like him. He didn't see me, and i was on a line buying an italian ice from the window of the beauty product outlet which replaced the torn-down Shalespeare and Co. Bookstore on 81st Street and Broadway like nine or ten years ago. I don't knwo what we would have said to eachother had he seen me, but i'm sure it would in some way involve my being defensive and ashamed of being unemployed, 23, and living with my parents. It occurs to me that i haven't hung out with any friends in weeks. And it occurs to me that it is both obnoxious and innappropriate to try to elicit sympathy from an imagined public via a blog entry, so i'll cease discussining my Marcusian estrangement from an imagined humanity here and turn elsewhere. By the way, NPR sucks shit. Particularly when the Jefferson experts offer apologia for slavery and Charles Hill and David Brooks constitute authoritative speech while Brian Lehrer responds to GESO veteran Corey Robin's (and yes, i do think it's pretty cool that he was on the radio in the first place) observations about rethinking the Cold War and the Reagan Era with a few brief and dismissive observations. (I also wish Robin had used the more damning anecdote regarding Reagan's meeting with the murderous Guatemalan dictator Erain Rios Montt in 1982, in which the U.S. President referred to the protestant dictator with strong connections to the Norteamericano religious right whose government had initiating sweeping death squad assassination tactics against students, workers, organizers, and indigenous peasants, killing some 15,000 people in the span of a few brief months, as "totally dedicated to democracy" and as haven been "given a bum rap by the press." The same press, of course, whose ranks the death squads were purging.