so i sit here, in my cubicle on the 15th floor of the National Football League office in midtown manhattan, not quite believing that days like this, when i bring up lunch from the huddle cafe to eat at my desk while surfing the internet, are numbered. i wasn’t feeling too well in the stomach the past two days, so i decided to be cautious today and got myself wild mushroom brisket soup, a piece of hard bread, some fresh mozarella with tomatoes and roasted peppers, and a piece of pan roasted salmon with strawberry salsa. at $6.17 for all this, and a tall starbucks coffee included, i don’t know where else in new york you can find as good a deal for such gourmet foods.

since handing in my final paper of my undergraduate career last thursday – a 12-pager for my chinese cinema class (I wrote it on Blue Kite, an excellent movie) – i’ve been bracing myself for the next chapter of my life (I know, how cliche) and i can only wonder what the transition will be like. to work long hours, to have no more papers or lectures (to fall asleep in), to no longer be a part of a campus (if i ever was), and to have the added responsibilites of living outside a pre-furnished, pre-managed college environment. hunting for apartments has been my most time-consuming task. i’ve seen apartments in chelsea, financial district and upper east side so far. i’ll have to check out murray hill and midtown west today.

yesterday i finally finished reading Barbarians at the Gate which chronicles the leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco eventually won by the private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts. in reading about the true life drama behind the scenes and the notion of managing the biggest deal in the history of business not only made me excited about working in finance but also made me question what the whole point of it was. the authors of the book do make the point that this whole LBO craze was an invention of Wall Street which, in the end, had nothing to do with the business of selling tobacco or cookies, which was how the company had made all its money in the first place. it really made me think about the business i am getting into – a place where you try to shift perceptions and profit from the visible difference, charging lucrative fees along the way. but of course, there is no need to exaggerate. financial services exist because companies have demonstrated need for restructuring debt or finding ways to fund new investments. it’s just that every once in a while, the market tends to allow for some questionable maneuvers that warrants criticism, regulation, and even punishment. i do feel good about writing that 25-page paper on investment banking during the Great Depression last semester.

i’m not quite sure how well i’ll use my time in the next month and a half. i hope to be industrious and productive, but that is always just wishful thinking at best. i keep having pleasant thoughts about playing basketball at Hidden Park again with my high school buddies. a few days ago, i wondered why i didn’t have the same male support group at Columbia as i had in high school. i realized that i hardly played the amount of sports here and whenever i did, it was with random people. i guess athletic activity is one of the most effective ways of bonding with people, and i am a bit regretful that i missed out on it during college. but hopefully a great deal of ball awaits when i return to edison next week.

i need to run to broad street now to check out an apartment. i doubt we’ll get this place because it is a bit out of the way, but it sounds like a good deal so who knows. it’s too bad none of us – me, warren, and rich – work at goldman sachs because this place would be an ideal location for it. i hope my j.crew shoes – the pair i bought last week after throwing up on my other black pair of shoes – doesn’t bother me too much. it’s one size too big, but i stuffed a piece of napkin on the back heel to prevent it from rubbing against the skin. i know – i am resourceful.

i’ve always had a fascination with shylock, the villain/victim antagonist of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. for my 10th birthday, my parents bought me an illustrated book of Shakespeare’s stories written in prose. my favorite one was The Merchant of Venice because there was an excellent illustration of Shylock – dressed in gray garb with curly hair and sharp nose – checking to see if his knife was sharp enough to cut a pound of flesh. i liked the story because as much as Shylock seemed despicable as a character, there was a very human quality to him. i think it was easy to identify with the feeling of being an outsider who constantly gets taunted and picked on, which was how i felt for some time in elementary school. the ironic thing was that the kids who picked on me in elementary school were Jewish. and yet, i still like Shylock.

here’s the oft-recited Shylock speech, which i’ve watched a bunch of times in the course of writing my paper on two adaptations of The Merchant of Venice – John Sichel’s 1973 BBC version with Laurnece Olivier as Shylock and Michael Radford’s 2004 version with Al Pacino as Shylock. both are very excellent, although it’s best to know the play inside out before you actually watch the movies.

“To bait fish withal: if it feed nothing
else, it will feed my revenge. He hath disgraced
me, and hindered me half a million, laughed at
my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my
nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends,
heated mine enemies; and what’s his reason? I
am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a
Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections,
passions? fed with the same food, hurt
with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases,
healed by the same means, warmed and
cooled by the same winter and summer as a
Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?
if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison
us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we
not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we
will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a
Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a
Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance
be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The
villainy which you teach me I will execute, and it shall
go hard but I will better the instruction.”

you have to watch when Olivier says “scorned my nation.” damn, so exciting.

for my structure & style writing assignment, i recalled an episode from a few months ago, added and deleted a few details, changed around the names, and called it my short story. but it’s still too close to what really happened that i’m too afraid to show people who i know. i remember reading jack kerouac’s Vanity of Duluoz right before i came to Columbia and romanticizing about the similarities we (Jack Kerouac/Jack Duluoz) shared – same height, same accomplishments (high school football and track), and same aspirations (journalism, romance). kerouac never really seemed to write much imaginative fiction — he basically told stories the way he experienced them.

i remember reading Maggie Cassidy and thinking about how i could write a similar story about my bittersweet high school memories (the book was actually given to me by an ex-girlfriend who wrote inside – “hope you’ll write a story about me one day”). and it’s interesting to note that On the Road was basically a ten-day binge writing effort by Kerouac after a trippy cross-country road trip with his buddies. the editor changed around the names, but everything else was basically the way it happened.

can we really say that he was a good writer if the core substance was merely a recollection of his experiences? something tells me yes – that it’s not so much about what’s imagined versus what’s pulled from actual experience, but what’s important is the way a story is told and feelings conveyed by the author’s string of words. kerouac definitely found a voice, and that’s probably why his novels, these disguised autobiographies, can be considered important fiction as well.

kerouac died tragically at 47, having had too much to drink. it’s 5am and i could surely use a beer. i do feel a bit better about my story, though.