"I keep making these to-do lists but nothing gets crossed out"

In that spirit, two passages I will try to live by, at least until my orals are over.

“Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. The only chance is to treat, not happiness, but some end external to it, as the purpose of life. Let your self-consciousness, your scrutiny, your self-interrogation, exhaust themselves on that; and if otherwise fortunately circumstanced you will inhale happiness with the air your breathe, without dwelling on it or thinking about it, without either forestalling it in imagination, or putting it to flight by fatal questioning.” --John Stuart Mill, Autobiography

“The moment the innocence or authenticity of our sense of being in the world is put into question, a far from harmless process gets underway. It may start as a casual bit of play with a stray loose end of the fabric, but before long the entire texture of the self is unraveled and comes apart. The whole process happens at an unsettling speed.” --Paul de Man, "The Rhetoric of Temporality"

I am trying to be better today. It's another one that's all cold and gray and pissing rain; at least this time I'm not going outside much, maybe just to the bodega-like grocery story a block away because I could use soy milk and more coffee and probably some lunch.

I want creative work that's something more than self-immolation as performance art.