I am, indeed, procrastinating. Instead of dealing with what I'm supposed to be dealing with, I'm writing this instead. Ah well.

I

Now that it is warm again, it is actually feasible to walk outside. Meaning, I am using my iPod again. (Yes, it's hypocritical, isn't it. As much as I rail against global capitalism, I, too, am enthralled by material things.) Despite the fact that I bought it with money that I do not have (the only good thing about an economic slowdown is that interest rates stay low, although I suppose this doesn't matter when you can't pay your monthly credit card bill or loan payment), I am very happy with it. I literally have a soundtrack to my life. (Set any mundane event to Fantastic Plastic Machine and I swear things will immediately become amusing in a wonderfully absurd way. FPM is like aural LSD or something.) Ah, the dream of a walkable city. This is one of the things that makes me not want to move back to L.A. (It's not just the lyrics to an '80's song. Really. Nobody walks in L.A.) There's something inarticulably grand about being able to safely walk to the nearby 7-11 and get some Gatorade and chips in a futile effort to stave off the inevitable hangover you're going to have after an impromptu 4-hour drinking session at the nearby bar. In L.A., I can't even contemplate walking two blocks to my oldest friend's house.

II

This is really a continuation of yesterday's post. Obviously, the inadvertant 10 hours of sleep that I got last night really didn't allow me to resolve the philosophical questions floating through my mind. But while flipping through some of the songs on my iPod (I don't remember if I've mentioned this somewhere else, but I have this weird tendency to index my memories by songs that were playing at the time), I thought about how I always tend to think of choices as dichotomous. It's either this or that, never both, and if I think about it hard enough, I don't know why that is. Why is it that I have to choose between the path I'm taking now, and some of the more interesting opportunities I've been presented with in the past. It's not like every chance (no, I am not talking about anything specific this time, really. I swear!) I am faced with is really mutually exclusive to the path that I'm taking, but maybe I just think too far ahead in an extraordinarily pessimistic manner. (Well, extend the timeline far enough, and the survival rate for everybody drops to zero. So saith my hero Tyler Durden.) My favorite rationalization for not trying something, for not taking a chance is, it's not going to turn out well anyway, especially given my current circumstances, so why even bother? But I know that it's just a rationalization for my inchoate fear of taking risks.

Ah well. Back to studying.

The song that triggered this thought? "Language or the Kiss" by the Indigo Girls.