I went to the corner store yesterday to get a hot chocolate (shut up) and there was a gray kitten sitting on the stack of New York Posts, licking itself, its limbs occasionally flailing about so as to land on the adjacent sunday Times. This would make a cute lolcats, I though to myself, and then I realized i really need to get out more.

This sense of perpetual confinement to my laptop, even when i'm unproductive, is what i hate most about graduate school, this loneliness and dread which are really much to trivial to merit any complaint that doesn't come off as profoundly bourgeois, in a lament of the overprivileged/white man's burden sort of way.

In any event I used to be much better at this whole self motivation thing, when mutual respect and charitable relations came only from below and I somehow managed to read three to five books a week in between committee meetings and organizing conversations and the rest of life. Which begs the question, have i been sniffing glue in my sleep? Eating lead paint in my pasta? What, in the words of Veronica Sawyer, is my damage?

I went for a walk today for the first time in a while, saw my high school girlfriend's best friend across fifth avenue up in the slope but doidn't call out. Not sure why i didn't. There was a street fair that stretched a mile and a half down 7th avenue and on the steps of a church a group of people were singing "I'm Still In Love With You," which, even if you're Rev. Al himself, takes balls. Or ovaries. Or transgender equivalent thereof. I can think of at least three reggae covers of "Here I Am, Come and Take Me," offhand, if we include the crappy and barely qualifiable as reggae UB40 excrescence. Irma Thomas is awesome. In this land of strangers, there are dangers. My guitar sits across the room unstrummed. Jenny Reardon's Race to the Finish awaits. I am thinking about the intro to Moanin' - the Mingus tune not the better known Art Blakey composition. iTunes shuffle conjures up Sleater-Kinney's "Leave You Behind" from the album that made me love them, and that seems a good a place as any to end this entry and get back to work before the ADD renders this screed completely incomprehensible.

I wonder how you looked the day you were erased