So many distractions, so little time

ShaZAAM! My first day back on the housing market, and what do we find? A gorgious pre-war rent-stabilized apartment between Manhattan and Columbus on a huge tree-lined street. Make that a boulevard. A beautiful tree-lined boulevard with laundry in the basement. The catch? Five flights of stairs.

Life is full of tough choices.

Second semester's almost over. I'm wallowing through the last section of my Gilda paper, trying to reorganize pieces of writing that I completed weeks ago. Writing is hard. It sounds easy when you put it like that, but no -- it's actually quite hard. Another paper by Friday, another by Monday a week, and then I'm pretty much done.

Liev Schreiber Rocks My World

Today I finally left my computer. Three days of typing, of wracking my brain, and generally failing to produce anything approaching cogent thought. I threw in the towel, went to brunch, then hopped on the train and went downtown to see....

Liev Schreiber in Talk Radio. Wow. I've seen Liev Schreiber, and he's certainly dreamy, but he's always kind of hovered in my mind next to Billy Zane in the Phantom. Onstage, though, he was electrifying. The show is an hour and forty minutes long, and follows the on-air breakdown of shock jock Bobby Champlaine, one-time idealist, now tackling anti-Zionist nut jobs, drug addicts, and (worst of all) liberal do-gooders on his nightly radio program. The show asks a fairly hard-hitting question -- what do you do when you've been elected the voice of the people, and you have absolutely no interest in what they have to say? Schreiber delivers a blistering response apropo of Faust -- you elect yourself their god, and you turn up the mike.

Needless to say, Talk Radio is particularly relevant in the post-Imus era. Sitting through the hour and a half is brutal and fascinating at the same time -- as someone who's managed the call lines for two hour shows, it felt like I was watching Marc Steiner all over again, battling between two particularly obstinate guests (usually a pro-Palestinian and a Zionist) on a completely intractable issue. You know it's not going to be over in the next twenty-five minutes, but you're also aware that there's something magic - and not a little painful - transpiring inside the studio booth. Schreiber's radio magic is rougher, more cynical, and a good deal less polite, but it is intangibly there, and by the time the two hours are up, it's hard not to feel a little bit transformed.

God bless the people at Virginia Tech. There aren't words for this sort of thing.

Dull sublunary lovers love.

There are some moments when you come across something you read ages ago and it just clicks -- just a brief moment of alignment, when you hear the phrase, remember it, and are suddenly transported.

This one reminds me of Mrs. Euker, Jonathan Goldberg, and twelfth grade English. Who does it remind you of?

A Valediction Forbidding Mourning

As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
While some of their sad friends do say,
"The breath goes now," and some say "No";

So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods nor sigh-tempests move;
'Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.

Moving of the earth brings harm and fears:
Men recon what it did and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers' love
(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.

But we, by a love so much refined
That ourselves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind
Care less eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

Our two souls, therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth if the other do.

And though it in the center sit,
Yet, when the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens after it
And grows erect as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must
Like the other foot obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.