I'm sitting in a hallway with my laptop deciding my future, and knowing what I know about mood-dependent decision making, it's terrifying. You choose a graduate program when you're tired and you end up with something way easier than is necessary, that requires something like a 1.5 GPA and a recommendation letter from your mom, whose coursework consists of memorizing PowerPoint bullets and learning how to write five paragraph essays. You choose a graduate program when you've just read a scholarly paper by your very favorite genius and you'll probably overestimate how much mindbreaking research you're willing to withstand in order to get to his/her level. Then you end up with a program you, A) can't get into, if you're lucky, or B) requires the kind of critical thinking where you have to have completely unique, perfect, and experiment-ready ideas coming out of your mouth/falling onto paper constantly, or else you fail as a human being.

It's somewhat ironic that I'm considering all of this given that the chosen graduate program has to include, at least in part, the further study of mood-dependent decision making. Maybe my thesis could be on how graduate students are only in the program I'm in because they had were in X mood at the time of their application process. That'd be totally meta of me and I hope someone would metaphorically kick me in the face.

I hadn't been thinking about my angle lately, whether I'm newly anything, because I knew, or thought I knew, that I am not, that it's hard to be new in your home country.

Actually, it isn't, and actually, I don't usually feel that way. More often than not I do feel like I'm in some alien culture, without even trying. Like a few weeks ago I was hanging out by the creek and three hippies were doing interpretive dance in a pool above a crashing waterfall. I was reading a comic book behind someone else who was also reading a comic book, and I kept looking up from my comic book, staring hard at the hippies, and hoping one of them would be washed down the waterfall, or at least submerge himself enough so that his dreadlocks would get wet. Shoes and tubers (the kind drinking beer in inflated truck tires, not the vegetables) kept drifting by them and they kept arching and chanting and spinning and dancing in the rapids. Nobody was even staring at them. Nobody even looked like they thought this was unusual, or also, like me, hoped any of them would fall over the rapids. A couple of people even looked like they were considering joining. But most people just kept having picnics, or reading the newspaper, or fishing for fish, or fishing their children out of the slipstream.

When one of them did finally go over the rapids (he was attempting to hoist his partner in the air a la ballet, and slipped with his bare foot on a mossy rock) and came up sputtering, dreadlocks in disarray, attempting to make it graceful by raising a curved wrist and inclining his head, no one even applauded. What crazy kind of alien town do I live in?

I told this to Chell in a loud bar with this minutes-long guitar riff echoing in my head and after that he started shouting in German.

"It's a foreign country if I do this!!" is how he preceded it.

"You can write about this," he said.

"Not since we've talked about me writing it."

"Why not?"

"I can't write about us talking about me writing something. Especially since now I've said I can't write it since we talked about writing it. That's way too meta. I'd have to shoot myself in the face."

"Shoot yourself in the face?"

"Yeah. For being pretentious."

Well, we all know what has to happen now.

This is what I write with my eyes closed. This is what I think early in the morning. I think, write with my eyes closed. I think that writing with my eyes closed will give me the kind of delicious words and nonsense that slide lazily through my head, under the covers, under the pillow, in the mornings. Sometimes I think about the word farmer. I think the word farmer is so profound. Maybe not profound, because there isn't that depth that early. That depth that early: delicious.

Like lyrics.

I've decided to stop smothering everything with meta.