Except that that's a lie. That's me at the beginning of TWBRW, sometime mid-afternoon on Monday following the first of several all-nighters pulled during the past seven days.
Yeah. I broke too soon.
As you might imagine, following that, the rest of the week was...actually, surprisingly bearable.
Yes, I found myself twitching more than usual (and as anyone who's had the misfortune to spend any regular time with me IRL knows, my "usual" level of twitchery tends to be somewhat higher than most people's to begin with). Yes, I gave up the entire notion of actually cooking meals and subsisted almost entirely on granola and gummi worms. Yes, I came to the conclusion that I am an insufficient human being in almost every possible respect, and I hated myself to bits and I just wanted to curl up in my mermaid cave and die.
But then Geoff Berner came and played a show at Struts, and my twitches were twitches of happiness and everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.
Seriously. I love that man. He is a lovely, lovely man. For example: he started the show off by passing a bottle of Jameson's around the audience. For another example: in spite of continuously consuming the remainder of said bottle throughout his performance, when I went to purchase a CD from him after the show, without any prompting from me, he recalled having met me before. Which we had: last year at a house concert here in Sackville, which I had gone to without knowing who he was, because he happened to be performing alongside the great and wonderful Carolyn Mark. I had swooned like crazy over his performance and subsequently bought his previous album (Wedding Dance of the Widow Bride) on that occasion, and then geekily told him I couldn't go to the bar because I had to go home and write an essay. Then he asked what my essay was about, because he's a lovely man. Funnily enough, it being TWBRW, this scenario was repeated when we met on Wednesday night, only this time I was buying Klezmer Mongrels. (They're both amazing albums, by the by.)
A word (or possibly a tirade) on essays: I don't really understand how anybody ever writes a paper of any kind without also staying up all night at least once in the process. I don't mean the poorly-researched, last-minute, total bullshit kind of all-nighter, necessarily. I just mean that, in my experience, getting so tired that you don't care if somebody important thinks you're stupid is an essential step in the process of creating anything that is going to be read by anybody you think is in any way intellectually admirable. Having written that last sentence, I think I'm beginning to understand why an elder once very sweetly and sincerely advised me to try smoking some marijuana the next time I had to write a paper. I also think that it's probably patently obvious to anyone reading this blog that I am not what you call cut out for academic pursuits. So why do I pursue them?
...that, pudding, is one of those questions I'd like to defer addressing until possibly never. Certainly until some time after reading week.
In the meantime, me and my dinosaur will be spooning with various published works of Tony Kushner in the mermaid cave.
More Life (or something),
Emmet
P.S. - I am sure that the above-linked Wikipedia article on T.K. is just brimming with inaccuracies, but come on pudding, it contains the most nerdfighterly picture of him (or perhaps any human being) I have ever seen. It's literally a picture of him simultaneously being awarded a degree for dedicated nerdiness and standing up against worldsuck, with puff levels even the young John Green could never hope to achieve.
P.P.S. - Oh gee, I just confused and alienated soooooo many readers, didn't I? I'm sorry pudding. You'll figure it out some day.
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