if i was stranded on a desert island, and i could only bring one youtube video with me, this would most likely be it:

from the description:

“without warning to those that were unaware, hundreds of students packed the library lobby and brought it hardcore for over 8 minutes.”

oh how i miss my school. hark the sound, baby. hark the sound…

i have for the last several weeks been trying to write.  i have lots of ideas.  character sketches, plot outlines, emotions, memories, ennui, pork chop sandwiches.  i have detailed plans in my head of what i’m going to explain and how i’m going to explain it.  there’s just this one nagging thing keeping me from doing it.

i’m suffering from a complete and total lack of confidence.  i sit and i sit and nothing comes out.  i turn on music, check my email.  sit some more.  and what is my result?  i get pages and pages of crap like this: “There once was a young man who rode the subway with the same unrecognizable, pale-faced businessmen every morning.” or this: “whoever wrote that is condescendingly smitten with his or her own level of intelligence, he thought.”

nothing is clicking.  it’s all garbled nonsense. nothing i’ve penned in the last six months has made me genuinely excited about my own writing.  which sucks.  you have to be your own biggest cheerleader and fan because nobody’s going to make you sit down and do it.  so my confidence is gone, and i have absolutely no clue why.  shit even writing during the brain injury was easier than this.

work has finally calmed down from its summer levels of ridiculousness to something more manageable.  i make it out by 6 p.m. almost every day, only had to work one weekend in the last two months, and only really have to stay late on a weeknight once a week, if at all, as opposed to every single boring tiring monotonous day in august and september.  so i now i have something i didn’t have this summer: free time.  not tons and tons of it like college.  i seriously have a hard time remembering how i filled an entire day with shit to do in college. and it seems ridiculous to me now that i would spend at least an hour a day sophomore year working on that silly book.  sometimes i’d blow off papers and exams to spend 3-4 hours in caribou, sipping coffee, as i rewrote over and over a single chapter, or hell sometimes even a single paragraph.  im especially anal retentive when i get to the editing stages.  230 pages and two semesters later, i had something that — despite its completely unpublishable and not to mention unshowable status — i was pretty damn proud of.  and i think i learned a few important lessons, but its possible that it was a completely narcissistic exercise of self-indulgence. (the working title was, after all, “an ineffable journey of perpetual astonishment,” which was meant to be funny because of its overwrought sense of importance, but now just makes me cringe that i would give a book such a silly name).

when you’re working on something that long, you’re going to have unproductive days.  that’s okay.  what’s important is that you make yourself sit down, every day, with a block of time set aside, and just see what happens.  what dreams may come.  sometimes i’d sit down and write a completely unrelated short story inspired in all likelihood by nothing from the book whatsoever.  blogging and journaling were good outlets as well.  nothing calms the nerves or soothes the soul like a solid, quickly written, self-absorbed rant about what’s going on in your life.  what you’re excited about.  what’s making you anxious.  what you’re hoping for.

i think i’m sucking at writing because i’ve fallen out of the habit.  i used to write at least once a day.  i’d be upset if i didnt get at least an hour somewhere to let my fingers loose on a keyboard.  now i sit down to do it maybe once a week if i’m lucky.  i just get distracted doing other things.  or i come home from work and i’m tired and i don’t want to do it.  i watch too much tv.  i eat out too much.   my life is getting cluttered with nebulous peripheries.  time just seems to disappear into bottomless black holes.

will and i talked at the bar about senior honors last night, about how we were just dialing in our stories by the second semester, that we both stopped caring.  i’m not really sure why.  in advanced fiction, every story i wrote for durban i wanted to make perfect before i showed it to her.  i would have been embarrassed to give her something i hadn’t put my full efforts into.  i knew no matter how good it was she’d tear it apart and i’d have to restart.  so it goes.  i went through 19 drafts of cinderella’s castle before i turned in a “final” copy, and durban swears my first novel is going to be a continuation of that story.   i wish i had tried harder in senior honors.  taken some risks.  really put some writing together that was worth a damn and not so run-of-the-mill.  but instead i studied my ass off.  i wanted a 4.0 semester, which i’d never had before.  mock trial also ended up being double the commitment i had planned on.  when did we start going to so many tournaments?  being on exec board didnt help.  i ended up quitting the dth unofficially because something had to give.  i may have been dialing stories in, but i think i’m still happy with how my thesis turned out.  what i intended to write and what i actually wrote were two very different things.  i failed miserably at writing what i wanted to write, but i still liked the results.  is that success?  i don’t know.  sunday morning was okay.   and i think imperfection of faith is pretty good, but maybe only when i read it out loud because otherwise it’s just incoherent stream of conscious nonsense without a resolution or a plot.

in new york city, everyone is an exile, none more so than the americans

new york is such a strange place.  i think the subway exacerbates this.  you descend dirty concrete stairwells and step inside giant metal trains that screech like dying animals as they pull into the station.  nevermind my ipod, the MTA-issue brakes are more than enough to turn me deaf by the time i’m 25.  so you descend, and when you come up, you’re someplace else.  it sounds simple but it’s really quite remarkable.  cobble hill to midtown.  midtown to the west village.  upper east side to columbus circle.  gramercy to chinatown.  tribeca to chelsea.  these very diverse neighborhoods are connected by an emotionless, uniform system of tracks and trains, differentiated only by colors, numbers and letters.  you travel in a system of sameness through a varied and nuanced world.  and so in the process, the city feels disconnected.  everything is 5, 10, 15 minutes away from each other, sharing borders you never see, because you traverse them by subterranean teleportation.  from the train you’ll never see how chinatown blends into little italy into nolita into soho into the village, where the neighborhoods and their styles fold and bend together into one.  everything is jarring.

that’s why one of my favorite things to do in the city is take a car home.  they let us do it when we work late.  if i’m not too tired, it’s relaxing to stare out the window and watch the buildings change like seasons.  tall to short, back to tall, to brick to cement to glass.  sometimes i tell the driver not to take the FDR even though it’s ten times faster.  sometimes i just want to see new york.   the absolute best is taking the car to work early in the morning.  usually it’s the last 30 minutes of calm you’ll have all day, because you only really go in early when it’s going to be crazy.  but as the car takes you over the brooklyn bridge, the sun hits all the buildings at just the right angles.  i like to crack the windows and smell the air.  the east river actually looks blue in the morning, full of tiny ripples from the wind and boats.  but my favorite part might be when the car drives right past the front doors of the UN with all those flags.  it’s like holy shit, i work in midtown manhattan, which might as well be the center of the universe.  or the parts that matter, at least.

last night they lit the tree at rockefeller center.  i would have wanted to go except unc was tipping off against michigan state at the same time they were going to plug in all those little lightbulbs.  i left work at 5:30.  the lighting wasn’t happening until 9.  and yet, three and a half hours before anything was going to happen, enough time to watch a lord of the rings movie mind you, the two-block walk to the subway, which typically takes two minutes, took me almost twenty.  people were packed into the sidewalks, which were barricaded and patrolled by cops.  everyone stood shoulder-to-shoulder, shuffling their feet, not really moving much of anywhere.  they weren’t really people though.  they were tourists: doe-eyed creatures better suited for a petting zoo than city streets.  they stood and gawked at the buildings, or at their maps, or at each other, or the lint in their bellybuttons — whatever.  i’ve never seen a group of people look so clearly like they didn’t belong.  it was an odd feeling to be so facelessly surrounded and disconnected at once.  i wanted to sympathize with them, to help them get where they needed to be.  shoo them along with a soft pat on the back.  but in actuality i just didn’t care.  no time, no patience, they were obstacles, annoying the hell out of me, keeping me from getting where i wanted to go: home.

home.  where is that?  if it’s not a place… an idea then?  an idea untethered to a pile of bricks.

i had, by all objective standards, an awesome thanksgiving.  went to the macys parade and had a big dim sum lunch on the day of.  called my dad to wish him happy turkey day and make sure he was going to watch the cowboys play (they won). then on friday my mom, grandma and sister all came into the city — three generations of women in my life.  someone call the producers of ya ya sister pants: they want their sequel back.

after they arrived i showed them around midtown a little bit.  here is the tree, here is the swarovski star, here are the ice skaters, here is the starbucks.  we went inside st. patricks, and i told them how on the morning i got my LSAT score i excused myself from my desk, stepped inside this church, and said a little prayer before i would read the results on my blackberry.  later in the afternoon we did a little shopping at h&m and other stores i forget the names of.  we passed sachs fifth avenue and i asked my grandma what her first impressions of new york were.  she said she couldn’t imagine how all the people got fed.  and i have to admit, i tried to consider the sheer volume of one meal for everyone in new york, and it was staggering.

that night the four of us went to capital grille, a midtown steakhouse, and had a huge dinner.  porterhouse steaks, macaroni and cheese with bread crust and lobster, grilled asparagus with hollandaise sauce, mashed potatoes and gravy.  it was delicious.

next day i met them at 9:30 a.m. at the met when it opened.  we saw the painting of the little boys drawing graffiti in the church and we all laughed. i discussed one of the madonnas with my grandma and she said it was amazing how everyone was so talented to make what was on the walls. some of the paintings must have represented years of an artist’s life, from the sketches to the training right down to the actual physical painting of the thing itself.  my sister joked because her ex boyfriend was an “artist” but really he just threw paint at blank canvases, making quasi-interesting patterns of splotches, and called it”modern” art. i like the moma and all, but we didnt go that weekend, and i’m okay with that.

after the met i took them to brother jimmy’s bbq and we ate carolina pulled pork and mashed potatoes and collard greens, washing it all down with sweet tea, where the sugar is added during the brewing, so that it gets all supersaturated and delicious.  the waitress made fun of me for dragging them to a southern-style restaurant in new york.  they all lived in the south and could get this food any time they wanted it.   i drug them there because i wanted it.  i had to shamefully admit that this was true.  i wanted to share that food with people i knew would appreciate it.  that’s all.

so where is home.   home is 500 miles away.  it’s a combination of 3536 bent trace and 4355 peaceford glen drives.  historically you can mix in some darden road and some fairidge drive, but mostly those two places.  it’s also chapel hill and 106 cole street.  more than anything it was friday nights playing poker at noel’s table, saturday nights on dad’s grill, cooking fried egg sandwiches in mom’s kitchen, walking down the hill to the smith center on saturday afternoons, the newsroom in the union or the basement of gardner, spending entire reading days in murphey preparing for mock trial tournaments.  home is many things at once, all rolled up into a feeling.  it has its own place in time, because home is easier defined as a memory than in the present tense.

it’s also home to cook a 16-pound turkey with your roommate at 6 a.m.  to boil mashed potatoes, mixing in butter and milk and garlic and deliciousness.  to send text messages to your mom at 10 a.m. asking how long the macaroni and cheese needs to bake, and if you’re really supposed to put in enough milk to float the noodles like a bowl of cereal.  it’s leaving your apartment in the cold and miserable rain at 11 a.m. to pick up fresh green beans.  home is surprising the hell out of your grandmother, who the night before, asked you to order pizza for lunch so that you wouldn’t be put to too much trouble.  i’ll never ever forget the look on her face when i showed her the turkey in the oven.  she said to me, “i never thought i’d see the day when my grandson cooked me a thanksgiving lunch.”  i think i was beaming pretty hard by this point, and it needs to be said that my roommate andi is amazing.  while i was goofing off at the met all day with my family the day before, she had gone to the grocery store and bought all the supplies, including the very beautiful turkey that we stuffed with lemon, celery and onions, and basted with butter and savory spices.

home is 500 miles away, but that sunday morning and afternoon, with all the laughter and love in our tiny little brooklyn apartment, as i watched my grandmother’s hands make gravy from the turkey drippings, improvised with bisquick, needing only the memory of countless repitions on thanksgivings before, a little bit of home was brought to me.  and im hoping, just hoping, it can stay there.  because this city really is senegal with machines.  it’s big and noisy and full of people and happenings and yet somehow still one of the emptiest and loneliest places i’ve ever been.  maybe that’s because it’s so foreign.  new york might as well be china when you’re from high point, north carolina.

the difference is often barely noticeable.

dedicated to christine, who wasn’t there to listen to me whine, so i wrote this instead.  thanks fang.

taking a hiatus from this for a little while.

the only writing i want to do lately is about my life, which is inappropriate for the public internets.  or fiction in so rough a form that it ought never see the light of day nor bear my name at the top.

last round of updates:

living in brooklyn with andi now.  enjoy the neighborhood and our apartment, but don’t spend enough time there due to 90+ hr weeks at work.

fuck it.  i’m too tired to try to discern what is and what isn’t appropriate content for this space anymore.

over and out.

so this afternoon i intended to revise a short story, the chameleon and the tiger, with inspiration drawn from amanda mcpherson’s song, fireflies and honeysuckle. i kind of promised her i would, and i still will, at some point; but it’s funny to me how often i can sit down ready to write something but something entirely different comes out.

this is harlem as i see it.

i live in morningside heights, which is a stone’s throw from harlem. in fact, when i exit the d-train five blocks from my apartment at 147th and st nicholas, there’s a mexican restaurant on the corner of amsterdam that advertises itself as “nuevo harlem.” i did my homework before i took this sublet. violent crime and property crime in the area were all down 90-80 percent from the hey-day of the 1970s and ’80s crack epidemic. and the current rates were comparable to everywhere else in manhattan. but i mean, down 80 percent from 1,000 is still 200.

sometimes when i walk to work in my suit-and-tie, someone will yell something at me like, “hey white boy.” when i ride the train, i’m usually the only caucasian in the car. being a minority is a new experience for a heterosexual, white, christian male. i live on the corner of broadway and 149th street in a 2nd-floor walk-up. there is no air conditioning, but i have a window unit that i run at night and in the mornings. all the nearby shops are dirty and foul-smelling. gone are the cosmic cantinas and caribou coffees, replaced with crown fried chickens and dunkin’ donuts. i’ve found a few oases, like the laundromat across the street, where the owner calls me sweetie and does my laundry “extra special.” i tip them obscenely. the dry cleaner up the street, where i take my suits and dress shirts, the owner barely speaks any english and he’s always dismissively busy. but he has the best prices, so i keep going. my super is named maggie and she’s the best. there’s a garden next to our building called “maggie’s garden.” the new york restoration project paid for it be renovated several years ago, and now she takes care of it. she’s always smiling whenever i see her and she asks me how my day was and calls me “sugar.” i like maggie, my super.

there are no tourists on my part of broadway, so it feels lived in. there are lots of families and young kids. one day on my way to the grocery store (c-town, even worse than the tesco basement in prague) i had to dodge a group of seven-year-olds bicycling up and down the sidewalk on broadway. on my stoop there’s always a group of middle- and-high school-aged kids sitting around talking. sometimes there’s a fold-up table set up on the sidewalk where old men play dominoes and cards. at night there are lots of cars and shouting. the other afternoon i watched a guy chase this girl, who i assume is or was his girlfriend, calling her all kinds of obscenities. there’s a stoop near amsterdam where five or six haitians are sitting every day when i pass from work. i see drug deals all the time. sometimes right in front of cops. there’s a police station 8 or so blocks away, which is nice.

summers in new york are oppressively hot. when i go for a run, i run by the hudson river through riverside park where the temperature is a little bit cooler. i take it all the way up to the george washington bridge where the little red lighthouse sits beneath the giant steel skeleton. i like the smells on this run. there are pine trees and hot dog stands and people grilling fat juicy hamburgers. the water doesn’t quite smell salty, and even though i know it’s so dirty no sane human being should ever swim in it, some pleasant and fresh scent always seems to come from the breeze over the calm water. as mantas says, the worst thing about hot weather in new york is how every so often an utterly offensive smell will reach your nose and make you want to vomit. not so in riverside.

but a new york summer is every bit as hot and humid as a north carolina summer. i’m guessing the difference is that new york’s won’t last until october. i take the d-train from 147th down to seventh avenue to get to work. spending more than three minutes inside a subway station results in getting soaking wet from all the sweat. the cars on the d-train are, thankfully, air conditioned. but they’re usually so crowded with bronxians and harlemites commuting to midtown and downtown that i have to stand up for the entire train ride, shoulder-to-shoulder, bumping along with everyone else as the train tumbles down the dark subway paths. sometimes i let go of the handrail and try to see how long i can stay balanced. i call it “subway surfing.” but only when the trains are kind of empty. one time i almost knocked andi down because i wasn’t holding on to a bar. she was not amused.

oh, and there are no cockroaches in my apartment. but yesterday, on the way to the laundromat, i saw the biggest cockroach i’ve ever seen in my entire life. four-and-a-half inches of nuclear-resistant love. no joke.

tried to blog but nothing i wrote was particularly appropriate for this venue. instead, some random, unrelated tid-bits.

this is a heartbreakingly beautiful cover of bright eyes, first day of my life:

this is my new obsession since getting my lsat score: law school numbers

the subway stations are about three degrees below the temperature in hell. my suit is soaked by the time i get to work.

andi and i put in an application for an apartment in brooklyn. i’m really excited and hope it goes through. we’ll be living in cobble hill right off of smith street (google maps). someone called the area “brooklyn village,” which i’m pretty sure is a play on “greenwich village,” my favorite manhattan neighborhood. a new restaurant or bar on smith street gets written up every week. the commute to work is going to be great (~30-35 minutes) and the rent is cheap and our apartment large. much better deal than we could have gotten anywhere in manhattan (literally they only sold sardine cans for $2500+ per month). but after the broker’s fee and the bit of double rent i’m paying at the end of this sublet, all i can say about new york is that the whole damn city is one big scam.

In New York City, everyone is an exile, none more so than the Americans. -Charlotte Perkins Gilman

there is no internet at the apartment. right now i’m stealing from a network called “linksys” that hasn’t worked for the last 3 days, and i have no idea why, at this particular moment, it has chosen to do so with the speed of a great white snail and a connection status of “pretty friggin’ awful.” no complaints though. time warner comes on friday to turn ours on officially. the peasants at 568 w. 149th street will certainly rejoice. my roommates don’t own a tv and don’t want one, and i’m not too concerned. living without tv is one thing, but you start to have physical withdrawal symptoms when google and email and youtube are suddenly and irrevocably removed from your life. i make a 150-block trip down to this tea place on macdougal and third st. just so i can get bubble tea and free wi-fi. tried doing that this afternoon post-lunch, but when i got there, laptop and headphones ready to roll, i searched frantically through my book bag before i would allow myself to accept the fact that i had left my power cord at home, and that my laptop battery was completely run down to nothing from watching a movie the night before. doh. i felt like a real idiot. instead i read some raymond carver, scribbled in my journal, and took the most defeated subway ride ever all 150 blocks back home.

my life is still right now. calm before the tempest. i’ve emptied all the contents of my suitcases into the drawers and shelves in my room. i’ve found a dry cleaner, hooked up the air conditioner, put up curtains, contemplated a new bank, been to the grocery store, refilled the ink cartridge in my pen, made new keys for the mailbox — there’s really not much else to do. tomorrow i’m visiting columbia and nyu’s law schools. i am a wreck waiting on my LSAT score. every day i speculate to myself some number that it could be. but as more time passes, my confidence of placing an accurate number on my score gets weaker and weaker. 162? 167? all i know is without at least a little bit of luck on the logic games, the number could be low. very low. and that worries me. but i think i’ll be okay. on thursday i’m going to visit fordham in the morning, and then andi and i are meeting for lunch to discuss our plan of attack. i forget sometimes that this apartment isn’t really home. it’s a place to live for the summer. but wherever andi and i end up, yea, that place will be like home. sort of like that florescent hospital room in 115 hinton james north, or that cockroach-infested kitchen at 106 cole street. but try as i might, never quite like 3536 bent trace or 4355 peaceford glenn drive.

today i met mantas and paige for lunch. we went to a korean restraunt called hangawi on 32nd street between madison and fifth avenues. the name reminded me of “ungawa,” the command that tarzan would give the animals to make them listen. my dad used to say it sometimes to us kids to make us listen. this connection made me smile.

we entered at 11:40, but they didn’t start seating until noon. we put our name on the list and walked around a little. i was dressed in khaki shorts and a bright blue UNC t-shirt. mantas had just come from a job interview so was wearing a suit and tie. at 6′2 and 6′6 and walking through the tourists standing in line for the empire state building on 34th street, i’m sure we looked ridiculous.

the restaurant is wood-paneled and beams hang from the ceiling. when you enter, they ask you to remove your shoes and put them in a “cubbie” ala kindergarten at nap time. the floors are hardwood and cool to the touch. the tables are low to the ground and have cushions to sit on. there are empty spaces beneath the table, built into the floor, for your feet to go, and these are carpeted. i clinched my toes into the fabric and was reminded of john mcclain in the original die hard. each table has its own little nook jetting into the wall that is filled with oriental works of art. the tables had bamboo place mats and silver chopsticks. white unlit candles with tiny black korean letters wrapping around the sides sat in the middle of each table. the waiters and waitresses all wore loose-fitting clothes, adding to the zen-like atmosphere. the food was expensive, but absolutely delicious. vegetarian only, but that didn’t keep any of us from leaving the table full. i had the mongolian pot lunch special. it was a huge bowl of spicy soup full of mushrooms, onions and sprouts. it came with a smaller bowl of rice and a plate of fresh cabbage for dipping. i would definitely recommend it to anyone and would go back in a heartbeat.

how did i spend the rest of my day? sans internet i played super mario world with an SNES emulator and felt pretty useless. tomorrow though. there will be law school visits. things will get accomplished!

stream of conscious from the first ~24 hrs in new york.

bleary-eyed on the trip here. tried to sleep on the plane but could not. it was that awkward half-sleep where you’re dreaming what’s going on around you. and then you realize that really is the flight attendant asking if you want a drink or not. i was tired because i stayed up all night in chapel hill on andrew’s back porch talking about everything important in life. i mean it. everything important. we covered it. that was after he, christie and i walked 18 holes at hillandale. good little course. not very long, but when you don’t hit it straight like me and are playing out of the marsh, difficult none-the-less. i’m kind of sad because that’s probably the last time i’ll play golf for at least a year. it’s hard to get out of the city and go hit. besides, where would i store my clubs? i think there’s a driving range in chelsea. one of those multi-story things like in japan where space is even more limited than it is in manhattan. nerozumim.

so after two hours of sleep i departed. my mom drove me there and helped carry my bags. it was kind of anti-climactic getting on the plane. i was so tired, it was like i was detached from the whole experience of flying the nest for two years. plus i’ve had lots of practice with going away to college, new york for a summer internship years ago, and prague. still i figured it would be more, i dont know, emotional.

the world is too cold to be moral

i took a cab in. the driver kept asking me all kinds of questions about what i was doing. trying to drive up his tip, i suppose. we found the place. it’s in a busy part of manhattan north of columbia university on the west side of the island where broadway almost runs into the hudson. there were a bunch of people sitting on the stoop of my building listening to music and playing dominoes. broadway is about 100 feet away, with lots of shops and drug stores and restaurants. i drug my suitcases up a flight of stairs and felt ready to collapse.

first impressions of apartment: incredibly nice place. recently renovated, so new doors, new hardwood floors, new paint, new light fixtures, new kitchen counter-top, sink, appliances. bathroom is spacious (which is good because four of us are sharing it). roommates hadnt finished moving in. i wanted to help, but realized i would just be getting in the way. took a train down to greenwich village and visited some of my old haunts from freshman year. disappointed the park is closed. they’re moving the fountain a few feet. sucks. it was one of the best places to hang out and be lazy in the summer where you could listen to the jazz bands and watch the street performers.

took train back, my room has a mattress! so i’ll have a place to stay. one of my roommates asks if i want to go to a “house-cooling” party. i had said earlier i think i would just pass out early because i was so tired. decided i didn’t come all this way just to sleep on my first night. so i agreed, and she and i went to dinner at this great little hole-in-the-wall mexican place near columbia university. we walked there.  took the scenic route, 20 or so blocks along the hudson river through the riverbank park.  after dinner we took a train to meet her friend, and we went up to this apartment where all four of the roommates were moving out at once, hence the title “house-cooling party.” i had a few coors lights, introduced myself to some people i will probably never meet again (including this dookie that actually seemed like a decent human being — perhaps the first and only one?), and we called it an early night around midnight.

got back to my room, the bed had been assembled with the frame and everything. put the sheets on, crawled in, tried to sleep, but could not. and it wasnt for lack of trying. the people on the stoop had multiplied in our absence, continuing to play dominoes and carry on loudly. people honked horns, yelled at each other, car alarms went off. i would have closed the window but it was so hot and we don’t have AC yet (getting it today, hopefully) that i had to keep it open.

so i plugged in my ipod and fell asleep to coldplay. dreamed i was flying through space, then flying over scenes from my life. it was trippy.

i had forgotten how big everything in new york is. and how intensely small it makes you feel. it’s liberating and confining. a paradox of anonymity. i’m looking forward to settling into a routine. my commute to work should be short. need to find a dry cleaner and open a bank account with easy-to-access ATMs (wachovia is sparse in manhattan; bb&t nonexistent).

i guess i should give this an ending? how about:

i dont feel ready to be this old.  time to go to k-mart and make dinner.

So after I posted “Hey roaches, WE GOT YOUR QUEEN!” tons of people asked me where the video is from that night. Well, I found the clips and slapped it together using Windows Movie Maker. Check it out:

So school has ended, which means our email accounts are no good 60 days after graduation. Fear not, most of you might say. I’ve been using gmail/[insert-free-third-party-email-service-here] for the last several years! Well, as my dad pointed out, lots of companies automatically block gmail.com or hotmail.com because free accounts = spammers. And none of us want a precious cover-letter to wind up in the bottom of some prospective employer’s trash heap before he/she even gets a chance to reject it, now do we?

That’s why, with the help of Miss Fang, I’ve put together some tips for keeping our inboxes happy.

Sign up for a gmail account. I know there are probably other services out there, but unless you know of one better, I’m pretty sure that Google has set the standard. The web interface is easy to use, it has lots of customizations for Outlook, Apple Mail, Thunderbird, and hand held devices like Treos and Blackberries. It also has so much storage you’ll likely never be able to spend it all, ala Bill Gates’ fortune. And unlike most free email services, it doesn’t advertise at the bottom of your sent messages, only at the sides of your inbox based on keywords one of its super-engineered algorithms detects.

Forward your UNC webmail to said gmail account. Easiest thing to do before your email.unc.edu goes the way of the Do Do is to go ahead and get used to another service now. Go to http://onyen.unc.edu and click on “Forward email” for easy instructions on how to do this. A bonus: UNC’s spam protection is a lot weaker than gmail’s. After a few weeks you’ll be able to log into both side by side and watch as about 50 messages have been caught by Google but not by ITS. Suckers.

Sign up for an @alumni.unc.edu address. We all love Carolina, so why not show it off? Onyens may expire, but these bad boys are for life. Takes about two seconds on the alumni Web site to set it up. Now this isn’t an email account per se. It’s an address that people can send messages to that UNC will forward to another address. I’d recommend pointing this alumni address to your gmail account and take out the middle-man of your email.unc.edu account. Because as it’s been said so many times in this post, webmail is gone soon. You’ll just have to change it again when it does.

Link your @alumni.unc.edu address to your gmail account. This is the coolest part of the process, and the whole reason I decided to do this post. First of all, this gets rid of the problem I mentioned at the top of the post. Gmail accounts are great, but like I said, a lot of companies block anything that ends in ‘gmail.com’ because it’s an easy way for them to immediately eliminate a ton of spam. But if you link your alumni.unc.edu account to gmail, then all of your outgoing gmail messages will say that they’re from [username]@alumni.unc.edu. So you’re using gmail, but everyone else thinks you have some super-cool alumni.unc.edu account. For me, that made alumni.unc.edu a lot more attractive because when I thought it was a one-way account (people could send to it, but I couldn’t send from it), I thought it would just be a hassel to have two email addresses — one for incoming and one for outgoing. This solves the problem completely. So how do you do it? Like this:

Log into your gmail account. Go to Settings. Go to Accounts. Click ‘Add another email address.’ Follow the verification instructions. Once you’ve done that, go back to Accounts and set ‘alumni.unc.edu’ to your default. From then on, all your outgoing messages will say they’re from [username]@alumni.unc.edu instead of gmail.com. No more blocked resumes and cover letters!

Okay I’m done nerding out. Let me know if you found this helpful!

J.K. Rowling delivered Harvard’s commencement address this year. UNC didn’t get a commencement speaker because of the rain, but this is a good substitute. By the middle I was wishing I could take the LSAT right now no matter how bad I might mis-read a logic game rule.  My favorite part:

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all - in which case, you fail by default.

Read the full text or watch the video here. Special thanks to Christine for forwarding this to me.