i couldn’t recover from the few glasses of wine i had for dinner, so i found myself sitting at my desk at 2am having written zero words for my take home exam, due in the morning at 10am. i made myself some strong coffee and chugged as much as possible but to no avail. i could not concentrate. i went to bed.

i wonder if it was the coffee or maybe the excessive amounts of sparkling water i’ve been drinking lately; i found myself engaged in an eternal sunshine sort of trance, running through happy and not so happy memories of most recent times. i remember because i woke up a few times, especially when things got too sad or too unbelievably optimistic. it was intense to feel battered and rejected one moment and to re-emerge feeling hopeful and happy. i woke up around 8am feeling confused and a bit manipulated. the mind, when asleep, should not be toyed with in such ways. and yet, for all the resemblances to the movie, i still retained my memory. i should’ve taken a train to montauk yesterday.

somehow i managed to write five pages in two hours and even took some time to do my hair. john told me not to shower in the mornings before doing my hair, so i took his advice. i think it looks less poofier today. hair aside, i felt good being engrossed with shakespeare for a few hours. henry v, when read closely and examined for all its complex messages, is an incredibly powerful play that any ambitious artist – for theatrical or cinematic purposes – can mold to express his political agenda or personal story. as pretentious as shakespeare’s work, or professing to know about it, may sound, i think it’s worth trying to be familiar with the great things he has done for this western language and culture. but i do admit, i still find reading his work a bit annoying.

as i sit here at butler trying to crank out a screenplay, i keep thinking about the way charlie kaufman wrote eternal sunshine and how it so effectively captures the power of memory. to know that, of the two who shared many memories, you are the only one who still remembers or cares to remember – such pain (save the deaths of close ones) is often unrivaled in a dulled, middle-class culture such as ours. as impossible as it is for us to guess what another person is thinking, it is often too easy to speculate what they are not thinking and to feel bad about it. sometimes you just wish for memory loss because it would be a lot more convenient that way. nobody can cause a disservice to another if that were the case. then again, you wouldn’t have screenwriters telling beautiful stories.