(i tremble with the nervous thought)

i hate these days when i have to be at school all morning.

early this morning i finished another in a line of papers toward whom it is charitable to describe as mediocre. this one was on sartre's nausea, and the topic i chose from the list was:

what are adventures? why do they appeal to people? why does roquentin [the novel's narrator and main character] worry that they are merely thought up (in recollection) or written about? could you have an adventure?

of course i fiercely (if badly) defended that i could, and do, in fact have adventures. but like antoine roquentin, sometimes i wonder if i've ever had any real adventures. he makes a point of distinguishing between understanding adventure after the fact as told in a story, and adventure that happens in real time. in a story the mundane events that lead up to the story's culmination are valuable and interesting to both the storyteller and the listener because you already know that something is coming, that something's going to happen. that's the whole point of a story. when you're living these moments, however, they probably seem trivial, and in fact you ignore them, until something happens and you realize, "hey, something just happened." we'll call this notion of adventure "adventure lite". or maybe, "le adventure lite," because these folks are french.

but roquentin says that to experience adventure as it happens, you just have to be aware of time as it is passing. to quote hipolito in amelie (gah, these french are crazy): "we pass the time of day to forget how time passes." small talk and crossword puzzles, tv shows and naps: these are ways i have been guilty of trying to surmount time without actually having to pay attention to it. and when i say to my roommate, "let's have an adventure!", do i really want to "live in the moment," or am i just trying to make it to the end of the day? eh, anyway. i already wrote this paper once (due in 33 minutes), i ain't doin' it again.

in other news, even though my procrastination and general ineptitude warrant no reward, i decided to reward myself with a breakfast-snack, i.e. hot fries and a cherry jones soda, on the way to school this morning. this proved to be a mistake, as when i placed the soda in my bag to carry it to class with me, i somehow forgot to close it. thus, most of the stuff in my bag (though thankfully not my paper) is covered in sticky red crap. as testament to my ridiculousness, what really upset me about all this was the fact that half my soda was gone. those things are hard to find yo. later when i was sitting in the hall waiting for the ta to open the door to the room where i took my math exam (another 84, LAME), i was using a tiny green plastic sword i found in the bottom of my bag to turn the pages of 20,000 leagues under the sea, and my hands were pink and i had a cherry soda moustache and some guy totally laughed at me. normally i would have to break down and say "DUDE I CAN'T DEAL," but in point of fact, we've been enjoying very fine weather. like kingofsnake, i too love the fall (though i am unable to, in good conscience, make a clever double entendre as he did, since i've pretty much never heard one of their songs). i am wearing a scarf, and this the first step to recovery. you know, or something.

now: hot fries. in 17 minutes: existentialism.