"nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind"

In two weeks and a couple of days, I will be moving to New York and I am not exactly sure why. April 24th had just seemed like some distant date in the future, but today while playing Scrabble with her, Beki told me how soon it was, and yeah, I am still not sure what I plan on doing in New York. I have still yet to finish my resume, let alone send it out to any of the jobs I want to apply for. I have a non-refundable plane ticket and this experiment is about to play out to either good or bad results in a very short period of time.

Last night, in a fit of caffenation, I said New York is for suckers and posers, and decided that I want to fly from NY to Israel via Istanbul, where once in Israel, I would work on a kibbutz. This has been a plan for a while, but it will just have to stay a plan for a little while longer until I exhaust New York. There there will at least be boys' arms I can spend the night in, and people in love, with fetishes for the written word, and I can join them and stare googely eyed at all the prominent writers that are constantly holding readings. And hot dogs and cheap Chinese food and public transportation. Niki, the person I was going to live with is the biggest flake ever, which occasionally worries me about this situation, but now I am planning on not living with her, just so I won't be unprepared when she flakes out and decides she wants to apartment swap and live in my Sarasota pad, which was in fact her insane idea as of a week ago, but now she has changed her mind and what the plan is now, I am not exactly sure, and I think this is why Israel sounded so appealing last night.

Today, I read Dave Eggers' new story in the latest McSweeneys and it was so boring and painful to read. I didn't even read the whole thing, I skimmed it until the end. This is the first thing I read by him that wasn't written in first person, and I guess this is where the limit lies of Eggers' writing. His writing only appeals to me when it is in that engergetic (almost manic) first person voice of rising rising excitement peaking in joyous self-revelations that the reader also experiences. Eggers is not the most dexterous writer obviously, but when he hits the notes right, god, he is my favorite writer.

And because I am becoming bored with most fiction, I picked up Emerson today. Thank god. Thank Emerson. It was the medicine I needed. The book has been by my bedside for years, an old collection of Emerson that I picked up at a used book sale in high school. For whatever reasons, I haven't read from it since sometime in the fall. Every time I pick him up, I resolve to myself that I need to read him every week, a form of Church, and I am resolving that again today, right now, that I will turn to Emerson often and let him work that magic that he does on my sense of self. And I probably won't follow through on this and that is okay. Today, I reread "Self-Reliance" and I feel better about the future, about what will happen two weeks and a couple of days from now, about everything. I love writers that inspire you to try to achieve that human ideal. This is what all writing should do.