I like to perceive things in terms of the lasting visual impressions they leave in my head. Like for instance, my favorite books tend to have at least one scene that has left some lasting impact on my imagination. Or at least, I like to think of them in terms of scenes from some great Epic known as the Human Experience:

- Gatsby on a pier chasing after the unreachable green light across the bay - The Great Gatsby

- Holden Caulfield in the rain, lamenting the loss of his childhood - Catcher in the Rye
- Holden catching the kids falling off the cliff - above
- Huck Finn tearing up the letter and "damning himself to hell" - Huckleberry Finn

- Ivan Karamazov's encounter with the Devil - The Brothers Karamazov
- The Grand Inquisitor - The Brothers Karamazov
- Raskolnikov kneeling at the crossroads - Crime and Punishment

- Yossarian holding Snowden's dying body during the accident - Catch-22

- Mr. Ramsey reaching out to catch Mrs. Ramsey in his arms, only to grasp at thin air - To the Lighthouse
- The Ramseys' trip to the lighthouse in the future - above
- Lily Briscoe's vision - above

- All of The Sound and the Fury

Beowulf: Sing of walls!
Grendel: I'm singing of walls!

Grendel: So may you all.
- Grendel

- The final circle of hell - Dante's Inferno

- The bombardment of the rebel camp in the mountains of Spain
- Robert Jordan lying in wait of the approaching soldier - For Whom the Bell Tolls

- Meursault's murder of the Arab in the heat of the sun
- Meursault awaiting his death amid the "cries of hate" - The Stranger

- Rastignac's challenge to society in the cemetery - Pere Goriot

- Havisham's repentance and final moments - Great Expectations

- Paul Baumer in the midst of the battlefield, his return home, and his death - All Quiet on the Western Front

- Antigone's death - Antigone
- Oedipus gouging his eyes out in front of Jocasta's corpse (UGH) - Oedipus Rex
- Arthur's final moments - The Once and Future King

- I find it hard to pinpoint a scene in this book, but I know there was one - A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man

- Biff's struggle with Judas on the cliff after Jesus' death - LAMB

- The last scene of The Grapes of Wrath
- George killing Lennie - Of Mice and Men

- The creation's discovery of beauty - Frankenstein

- Piggy's death
- Simon's meeting with the Lord of the Flies
- Ralph and the boys meeting the rescuers - Lord of the Flies

- Esther imagining herself catching the falling petals from the tree - The Bell Jar

- the last fifty pages of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
- the electroshock therapy sessions from above novel

- The Pilgrim's Progress - Faithful's execution, arriving at the Celestial city

- The Scarlet Letter - Dimmsdale, Hester, and Pearl standing on the scaffold at night

- pretty much every major scene in the Bible

This can be extrapolated to music and games as well, but I won't go there this time.

And of course, when I don't feel so rushed, I don't feel like doing the things I wanted to do earlier... Bleh.

I've been feeling a mix of dissatisfied emotions today. I lied down in front of Doe Library to look up at the clouds at the sky... and it was a good feeling, but I was partly frustrated by all the floating little specs I kept seeing because of whatever the heck's up with my eyes. The thing that bugs me is that I don't really know what's bugging me right now. I just haven't been feeling.. clearheaded? for a while? maybe at all? Maybe it's just the combination of everything in general.

Maybe I should run down a list of things that have been bugging me.

1. I've been having trouble communicating with some people... people I don't talk to regularly, and people who I used to talk to regularly but not recently. I keep wondering if I'm just socially inept in that area and just have this tendency of making it awkward for the other person. It just bugs me because I want to talk about a lot of things, but I just get this impression that the other person doesn't want to... or doesn't care... so I stop. Then I get this feeling that even if I talked, I'd just be talking about myself a lot and my petty little issues. I like listening to people though!... kinda. I guess I have to be in a certain mood. but then I wonder how sincere I am when I do listen. I DON'T KNOW ANYMORE.

Well so that first point encompassed 3 things...

2. School. Too lazy to type this one up.

3. Sincerity.

...That's it for now.

I feel like I'm in such a rush to do work that I never get to doing normal things anymore. Like today I wanted to talk to one of my friends for a bit but I wound up cutting off the conversation cause I felt the need to work on my problem sets taking over my mood. How depressing.

Am I seriously going to keep this up for the next two years? I dunno anymore.

I wonder why I feel so fickle sometimes.

I like talking to people, even if it's about nothing. I sometimes find that my conversations about nothing are more meaningful than my conversations that actually try to have a purpose. Partly because when you get to the point where you can talk to a person about nothing for more than a couple of minutes, you get to know that person a lot better.

Good music speaks to me in some way. Words are meaningless unless arranged in a manner that makes them meaningful, or if the manner in which they are spoken, with or without the music, evokes a certain mood that an ordinary conversation wouldn't be able to do.

I tend to be critical of the things that I write within a few minutes of writing them. This is one example.

I want to be able to talk to the people I know more. But that's up to the other person.

To-do list for the weekend:

CS 61CL: HW 4 and 5
TRANSFER APPLICATION and PERSONAL STATEMENT
CS 70: HW 4
Chem 3B: ALL PROBLEM SETS and review notes, get the part of lecture I missed from Ryan
Chem 3BL: Lab Writeup and Prelab
Slavic 133: read at least 50 pages Pere Goriot

Internship fair on Wed and Thurs - think about resume
Research
Summer?

I don't mean to seem like I care about material things like a social status
I just want four walls and adobe slabs for my girls

- Animal Collective, "My Girls"

This album is ridiculously awesome.

Note to self: Insert history class with Henkin

Oliver Twist makes me want to read David Copperfield. Non-Great Expectations Dickens is fun!