Today was rather productive. Ran into a friend from college while on my walk into manhattan, got in two and a half plus hours of solid phonebanking, set up some lab visits, did a class visit, read, fed spooky, watched a little TV.

I also had the second bizarre NYC celebrity sighting in a week. (Last tuesday it was Russell Simmons at VP2, today Aida Turturro aka Janice Soprano outside the NYU dorm on University between Waverly and 8th.) It's such a bizarre existence, trying to live some sort of meaningful life among the walking figments of spectacle. Perhaps is this which makes us all such sarcastic hollow desperate rakes. That sounds profoundly reactionary, doesn't it? And also, incontrovertibly rooted in a certain racial and racist logic of the city in which something like grad school is very much implicated for me, and dreams of flight cannot dislodge or decenter even if my non drivers-license having, ratty passport holding-obligated to teach for two years ass could even figure out a way to realize them. But from here on out i stop complaining about New York in the age of American Apparel and Theory not the abstract noun but the soho boutique and instead i start moving forward. I am relying on you to hold me accountable to that.

And with that, i'll go to sleep.