i woke up around 7 am this morning, having failed once again to stay up and write my paper last second. this latest one was just too much – a 35-page rough draft for my senior thesis. i must admit, i had done little or no research in the past month that we were given to work on the draft, so with less than 12 hours left, i ate a burrito and then passed out on my bed with all the lights on.

i stuffed all my books – about 10 of them – into a barnes&noble bag and walked over to butler around 8am. there were still a good number of people here that early, most likely studying for their midterms. i sat down, opened up my laptop, and fell asleep again, my left arm serving as a pillow.

i woke up to the sound of my phone vibrating against my check in my coat pocket. i had kept my coat on because i was cold. it was an email message (yes, i am cool and get email messages on my phone) from someone i had emailed the night before. an unlikely quick response. it was a nice way to start the day, and i got to think about chang-rae lee’s aloft, one of my favorite books.

there was nothing i could do about the 35 pages. i supposedly had about 16 pages of it written from “section drafts” that we submitted in the past 3 months, but my topic had evolved and my research had shown that these previous papers were useless. i didn’t want to panic, so i didn’t. i sat down, a bit numbed. i checked my facebook to waste time and read a few nytimes articles. i had a film class at 10am so i packed up my stuff and went just in time to sign my name and listen to my professor speak for 30 minutes. i came right back to the library and began writing. i knew i couldn’t write up a full thesis draft, so why not try an outline to at least show i had something in my mind?

and that’s what i did for the next three hours.

in the meantime, i received an email from Columbia College Today (where i’ve worked for the past 3 years), telling me that i was the new class correspondent for the class of 2005. an honor usually bestowed on some important student leader (mik and novi, the 2004 and 2003 correspondents, were both student body presidents), i was given the job because i had been with CCT and was proven to be reliable. it’s nice to know that, having contributed to every issue since november 2002, i will continue to contribute content for the magazine as long as i am correspondent. sweet. it also gives me a reason to come to alumni events from time to time.

i managed to crank out an outline, but it was already 3pm by the time i printed enough copies to give to my classmates. the senior thesis seminar was a 2pm-4pm class, so i had already missed half of it. i decided between writing a cowardly email to my professor with an excuse about being sick or going to class late and explaining how i hadn’t done jack for the past month. the latter scenario prevailed, and i found myself walking towards hamilton with my 4-page outline (versus 35-page paper). when i got to the door, everyone in my class (all five of them) had started walking out the door.

“she let us out early today,” someone told me. snow had been falling hard all morning, so the campus was covered in white. i waited by the stairwell for my professor and when she finally came out the door, i told her i had not written my paper. she was understanding. we went to the carlton (?) lounge in avery hall and i told her about some issues i was having with defining terms and finding new material that greatly affected the course of my thesis. i was pleased that most of the stuff i said was pretty genuine, and she was very nice about it, giving me a two-week extension on the paper (considering my going to Paris for spring break). a huge stroke of luck. damn, i love it when i act on instinct and it pays off.

i came back to my room a new man and checked on my work laptop (a heavy dell latitude that i keep on my desk) to see what was going on at the NFL (and to pad my “remote” work hours). we’re launching the Playbook intranet website on Wednesday (today), and although i won’t be there because of classes, I am excited. furthermore, a week ago i wrote up a “script” for Rich Eisen, former sportscenter anchor and host of NFL Network’s Total Access, to introduce the site in a video that we were going to stream to our employees. ragu, my IT buddy at NFL, sent me the video file via email and I got to see how my writing sounded like when Rich Eisen said it. boy, it was hotness. i think someone at the network added a few phrases (maybe Eisen, himself) to make it funnier, but when he finished with “convenience and efficiency at the click of a mouse,” i had chills down my back knowing i had written those lines. it reminded me of another line i authored, for the speechwriter protagonist in my KSA culture show movie: “I think it’s every writer’s dream to have his work read by someone important.” dream come true, however minor the writing.

the weather is ridiculously cold and i haven’t done much work. i am severely lacking in sleep although i must’ve garnered about 2 hours of naptime in chinese cinema – yellow earth was a beautifully shot and directed movie (like no other communist movie i’ve seen so far), but once i realized the impossibility of the soldier having sex with the girl who lived in the peasant home, i couldn’t stay awake. i bet if they made the same movie today, there would have been nudity at some point, even if it’s in that rough real-life style that hong sang-soo does so well in his films.

suffering the cold here, and i became curious and checked up on the 10-day weather report for paris. not too promising. lots of rain and temperature in the 40s. rain reminds me of paddington bear because he wears that blue jacket and yellow cap as if it’s always raining, but i was reminded that i’m going to PARIS, not that other city across the channel. babar, right?

i’ve had a venti drip from starbucks in the past two days to stay awake late into the night. i usually never finish a venti drip, so after two days, the venti cups were still on my desk with an inch or less of cold coffee left in them. i noticed that starbucks has a tried to make their cups more interesting with a series of “The Way I See It” quotes from people who have important things to say. I got #1 and #14. Maybe these are collector’s items like those random messags under Snapple bottles some time ago. for those who would like to skip on the venti and just know what the cups said, here goes:

The Way I See It #1
Zeroes are important, A million seconds ago was last week. A billion seconds ago, Richard Nixon resigned the presidency. A trillion seconds ago was 30,000 BC, and early humans were using stone tools. America’s national debt is $7.5 trillion, and it’s skyrocketing, even as America’s population ages. There will never be a better time to start paying off this crippling debt than today.
— Denis Hayes, Chairman of the Earth Day Network and longtime environmental advocate

(pk comment: I don’t get why some environmentalist gets to be a spokesperson for the nation’s debt problem. Is there some connection I am not seeing? Shouldn’t he go save some whales or clean the air? Or hug trees?)

The Way I See It #14
1.6 million years ago a youth died in Africa. His body was swept into a swamp. In 1984 his bones were painstakingly excavated to reveal a species on the brink of becoming human. All people on earth have one thing in common. We share a single African ancestor; the same as this young boy.
— Dr. Louise Leakey, Paleontologist and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence. She is currently working in Kenya.

(pk comment: What happened to Adam and Eve? This statement sounds like we’ve accepted evolution as a fact or something. Haha. Just kidding. I once saw an evangelical Christian website for kids where the “atheist” was a grumpy goat who drank lots of caffeine. Starbucks strikes back at Creationists!)

for every posting on this blog, there are one or two posts that never make it as public veiwing because i am dissatisfied by the writing style, the subject, or both. sometimes i write very private and embarassing things and don’t have the guts to post them. but i keep all entries saved and reference them from time to time because it’s always fun to remember how the mind was working at a different time in the past. sometimes, it’s tough to believe that it was actually me who wrote some of these reject entries.

i found an entry from the early days of my blog that never quite made it because after i wrote it, i had issues with the term i had devised: “midday crisis.” it was contrived in such an artificial way – i had heard “quarter-life crisis” in a john mayer song and was, simultaneously, having a crappy day – so i wanted to feel clever and told myself that my “midday crisis” would come and go. the entry contained “scenarios” as examples of a “midday crisis,” and although they seem to concern greater issues with life as a college student, i found it interesting to read about the things that bothered me last year. in fact, these thoughts seem even more relevant today:

(taken from posting in April 2004)

examples of midday crisis scenarios

1. sitting in a class lecture, not really paying attention, you wonder why you bothered to show up in the first place. then you go on to think about how useless most of the education really is. this gets you thinking about how you waste your parents’ money and how pointless college really is.

2. you’re reading for your research paper. you have three thick books. you try your best to get through them all, but even as you’re reading them, you realize you’ll never know enough about the topic. then you wonder how pitiful your paper will be and how fruitless it is to write on a topic that has probably been written about by some smarter, more qualified scholar. you don’t want to write anymore and the topic sickens you.

3. as an involved member of the campus community, you recognize that more than half the student body really don’t give a hoot about what goes on. you wonder why you’re so active and if there really is a point to it all except those fleeting moments of self-satisfaction and some compliments thrown at you by peers doing the same thing. you realize what you do is nothing great, but mostly out of self-interest. you wonder if you should reply to those emails and carry out tasks you have decided to be responsible for.

there’s something nice about salvaging a piece of writing that, otherwise, would have been forever forgotten. it’s like claiming back the few minutes (or even a few hours) that you might have spent thinking up something and putting it down into words. it’s also assuring to know that what you once thought in the past, whether it was days ago, months ago, or even years ago, can still make sense today.