Monday Morning Commute: Johnathan Swift Makes Me Stiff
Spring has sprung! Or something. It’s always weird when the days are nice, but life hasn’t returned to the barren shitland of New England. There’s something odd about walking around and loving the blue skies and warm weather and seeing no leaf or greenery within my purview. Whatever, I’ll take the sunlight, man. Nothing perks up my spirits (and all of humanity’s) like a nice beautiful day outside. It’s almost enough to make me forget the ashen butthole that is winter time.
Can you notice I’m falling less and less in love with snow and frost? It never used to bother me when I was young. Now I hate it with a ferocity usually reserved for dying on boss fights, or the prequels.
Monday Morning Commute. Every Monday I’m going to detail the various things I’m either currently or will be watching, reading, playing, and listening to in the next seven days. It’s Monday. You’ve got a long week of school, work, or compulsive masturbation to get through. Tell me the arts that you’re indulging in, to stave off suicide.
Reading / Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift
Every once in a while I try and stunt and pretend I don’t like the enormous workload of reading I have to pull for school. But if I’m being completely honest, I generally dig most of what I’m reading. (Ignoring completely like 75% of the shit I’m pulling for one particular class this semester.)
And if there’s one dude I’ve always dug reading, it’s Jonathan Swift. Do yourself a favor and check out The Lady’s Dressing Room. The dude is a pretty ballin’ ass satirist and social commentator. And so when I found out that I had to read him, I was understandably excited. A little bit.
Despite the fact that I enjoyed his work, and I’ve always sadly associated Gulliver’s Travels with that NBC mini-series or some shit. I think it starred Ted Danson. So when I had to write it, I was like, fuck me, I can’t bare this.
And then?
Apparently it’s dope social commentary like the majority of his other work. You know, wrapped-up in a bunch of fairy tales and shit. Ignore the talking horses and take it as a critique on rationalism, government, and the such. One recurring thought while I work through my old-school British literature classes is how amazingly the same we have been for the last four hundred years. I don’t know if I find this comforting, or haunting.
Progression is an illusion! BRB, jerking off to Post-Modern theory. Just kidding.
Watching / Playing / Listening To
I’m fucking busy lately. I haven’t been playing anything new – just wading through Final Fantasy XIII, playing some Fallout 3, listening to the same old shit. I get two hours of FFXIII or so before I want to kill myself over the storyline. If I wasn’t enamored with the battle system I wouldn’t have gotten as far as I have, and I forsee a slow march to the finish.
I’m seeing Opeth on Wednesday night for a 20th Anniversary show, and I’m totally stoked, while being neurotic about how it’s going to affect my course load. The Gods of Academic have conspired, as usual, to force everything due on the same time. And it happens to be next Monday. And I usually do my work on Wednesdays, and Thursday. I need to pop a xanax and just enjoy the ride, yo.
Watching? I’m watching LOST, of course. The final countdown!
Same ‘ole, same ‘ole. Yo!
My room flooded last week from the unrelenting torrent of hell precipitation last week. Currently there are three fans and a dehumidifier working without reprieve, trying to dry my dungeon out. That’s what I get for living in my parents’ basement and being a walking cliche. The room smells of wet genitals and dog hair. It’s not the most fertile of writing environments. Or actually, maybe it is; for I wouldn’t be surprised to find enough bacteria sprouting on the underside of my carpets to fill many a petri dish.
Last week I almost died trying to get to class.
The rain was falling like fucking woah, and roads were flooding like it was the new black. I had already hit three detours and when I saw a giant puddle in front of me, I thought there was no way I was turning around.
Thirty seconds later, I was nearly filling my underwear with brown panic.
I drive a little Subaru Impreza. It’s not high off the ground. And as I blasted through the puddle, I kept submerging. And submerging. And submerging. By the middle of the puddle, the water was up to my driver side door. It was right about then that I thought, “Ian, you’re about to die. Or break your car. Whatever of these two circumstances should happen, Dad is going to be pissed.”
Somehow, through some sort of divine providence by the God I don’t believe in, I made it through. My engine was making all sorts of noises and the car seemed to be steaming as it burnt off the water that infiltrated its internal organs. But I made it.
It was one of those moments that, upon reflection, wasn’t the wisest of choices. Generally these moments of mine are confined to things I say while pissed off to my girlfriend, or things I do to gaming controllers in a blind rage. But looking back, I was like, Jesus Christ Drinkwater, what the fuck was that?
In my defense, I spent like ten hours reading Jane Austen’s Persuasion. And since my graduate courses are seminar classes that only meet once a week, if I didn’t make it to fucking UMass that day, all my effort was going to be for nothing. So fuck puddles and fuck water and fuck the impossible! I rolled up into class, albeit twenty minutes later and with assuredly some permanent water damage, but I won!
Ian: 1, Mother Nature: 0, until the long-term effects take place.