procrastination

The depths of my procrastination

I've spent the morning procrastinating from writing my thesis. Haven't watched a single youtube video. What I HAVE done is 1. compile a wishlist/reading list of books on America culture in the 1930s 2. Look up authors that I'm reading a lot of and see where the teach/ if they're chairing any graduate programs.

http://www.andrewroth.com/publications/killed-rejected-images-of-the-farm-security-administration/

my life is fucked.

In the library. Again.

I'm sitting in the library at Concordia University. The sun has left us again, the clouds are back. Before I begin thesis revisions, I'm looking through a magnificent coffee table book called Gulag: Life and Death Inside the Soviet Concentration Camps. All I can think about is the relative arbitrariness of temporal vocabularies used to describe state domination, national domination, human domination. Invasion and domination and colonialism all bleed into each other somehow. How can we claim post-coloniality when we live in an age of cultural and social colonialism and control? De facto colonialism.  How can we make that distinction and still honor the experiences and histories of those living in the aftermath of structured colonialism? How can we make sense of our places on each side of the equation, which is not so much an equation as a jumbled mess of contradictory truths?

The USSR was massive. It took up a lot of space, it swallowed up a lot of space, it spread over a vast amount of space. Is size it? Can we ascertain the effect of a thing by the size of it's influence? How can you measure the size of horror? It's not just big, it's something different. Or happiness? Or do feelings exist separately from spatial quantification? Where's the overlap?

Back to the photos, back to the revisions.

Perfect morning

I spent the morning reading Vanessa Davis' Make Me a Woman and it's fucking amazing! I checked it out of the North Portland library the other day when I was picking up books to cram for the Graham Harman lecture that happened at school last night. My favorite part about the public library is the graphic novels section. That's where I found Special Exits, at the Lacey Library when I was living in Olympia.

Make Me a Woman is a bunch of diary comics, a lot of them are set in New York, some in Florida, some in California....Alexis, I think you'd really love them....they're about being jewish and they're so funny.


I also painted my nasty little claws.

my library card from 3rd grade still works, i've spent the morning watching replacements videos on youtube and putting books and videos and cds on hold at the nypl. i set up my room yesterday. i've been writing letters. i'm going to a yoga class at 12:30.

Terribly Homesick

I have settled into my mini-room in Olympia. I am ridiculously and pathetically homesick. If you happen to be on my extensive list of mail-recipients (and I don't know why anyone who didn't know me would read this), you can look forward to receiving a whiny and depressing letter, detailing my limited experiences so far. Some of the highlights including :

walking to and from downtown a few times a day.
wondering if people notice that I'm always walking to and from downtown.
chastising myself for wondering if people are noticing me.
wondering if people think I'm a weirdo for walking around so much.

It's the sort of beautiful cycle of thought that only occurs when one spends immense amounts of time alone and without aims or goals. Perhaps, as any number of people have told me in the months leading up to this move, Olympia was not the best possible destination. It is too early to tell, but it's on my mind. I've also found myself overly concerned with "bothering" people, which has so far translated into not getting in touch with anyone I knew last summer, and having my feelings hurt that my house was not demolished in a mad rush of people trying to hang out with me. So, in the end, I know I'm being pretty ridiculous and more than a little self-centered, as well as quite impatient and unrealistic. But still.