Excerpts (i)

I write in a moleskine sporadically. This is an excerpt from my road trip last July:

July 23, 2010 - 1:51 am
Dark clouds lit by a rear full moon frame the sky.
In the distance, on the horizon, lightning flashes illuminating the milky blue expanse.
It's something out of a Cormac McCarthy novel.

School Year End & Sunrise

My first year of graduate school ended on Monday. It went by very fast, as these things usually do. There have been the standard festivities involving food and drink, but this morning some of my classmates and I went out to the Mass. Ave bridge to watch the sunrise over the Charles River. After a week of unseasonable cold and rain, it was warm and summery today and walking there at 4:30 am was quiet and relaxing. It was a great way to unwind.



We headed back around 6 and were pretty tired and hungry, but Andre wanted a picture of himself jumping over a bench.



I'm now on my first summer break since 2006. My plans aren't finalized yet, but hopefully I'll be able to do something productive and/or fun. I hope everyone else does as well.

Eye Of The Storm

I mentioned in the previous post that I'm done with my finals, but still have a comprehensive exam (a test that covers all the core econ material for the year and is a requirement for graduation) left. That's over a week away, so I'm doing my best not to think about it for a few days. A classmate had a big BBQ today at his gigantic house, dubbed "The Manor," a little out from BU. It's an old, stately looking house that creaks and has bats living in the walls, but the backyard is perfect for BBQs. The weather wasn't the best, but it was still a nice way to take our minds off of things.



My classmate and his roommates prepared the general BBQ fare (burgers, brats, ribs, and steak), but also somehow managed to ship 60 lbs. of live crawfish overnight from New Orleans. The afternoon became a swarm of people hovering over a table piled high with steaming crawfish, sucking the innards out of the diminutive crustaceans while their remains littered the floor around our feet.



It was a relaxing day. It'll be a few days yet before I venture back to the library, so until then I'll be catching up on sleep and doing absolutely nothing, while trying not to compulsively check for grades online.

Sail Away, Sail Away

A list of some of the words and names I'd like never to hear again: autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity, polynomial distributed lag, Dickey Fuller, Breusch Godfrey.

I had my last regulation final this morning. I still have a take-home test due tomorrow and a comprehensive exam on the 23rd, but I have a bit of a reprieve now. A little after the test a couple of friends and I went sailing on the Charles River. One of my classmates had taken the sailing class this semester and is allowed to check out sailboats. So we spent a little while hanging out on the river. It was a nice way to unwind after a hectic week. It was a small boat so too much maneuvering wasn't really an option, but I took as many shots as I could without capsizing us. This was also the first time I've ever worn boat shoes on an actual boat.



The semester's not quite over yet, but it's close. Summer's around the corner and I'm not really sure what I'll be doing, but I'm looking forward to a break.

he thought he was an angel

I recently started watching Mad Men and am about halfway through season 4. It's not quite what I expected. From what I knew of Don Draper secondhand through pop culture references, I saw in him a powerhouse of a man that ruled Madison Avenue. What I really got was a broken shell- the veneer of male dominance a thin curtain shielding the profoundly sad boy inside. Don Draper cheats on his wife because he doesn't know how to be happy with what he has. In the last episode I watched, titled "The Summer Man," Don Draper begins writing a journal in an attempt to address the chaos inside himself. He begins somewhat innocuously, "A list of things I'd like to do. One, climb Mount Kilimanjaro. Go anywhere in Africa, actually." The next line begins a more poignant stream of uncharacteristic introspection: "Two, gain a modicum of control over the way I feel. I want to wake up and I want to be that man." I haven't kept track, but that may be the first instance of his explicitly expressing genuine dissatisfaction with himself. Later in the episode he continues elegiacally:

"When a man walks into a room he brings his whole life with him. He has a million reasons for being anywhere, just ask him. If you listen, he’ll tell you how he got there, how he forgot where he was going, and that he woke up. If you listen, he’ll tell you about the time he thought he was an angel and dreamt of being perfect. And then he’ll smile with wisdom, content that he realized the world isn’t perfect. We’re flawed because we want so much more. We’re ruined because we get these things and wish for what we had."

Don Draper is the perfect caricature of the American man. Unreasonably handsome, aggressive, and self-assured while also supremely discontent and unable to take responsibility for himself. There's little I can say about Don Draper that hasn't already been dissected by students of American media already, but it's been almost cathartic to see him get to this point. It's hyperbole, but I sometimes see parallels between the process in which Don Draper slowly comes to terms with his fundamental unhappiness, thereby allowing himself to pursue real happiness, and the process of entering adulthood and understanding the truths of my own flawed and broken nature. It's hackneyed and melodramatic, but it's there.

I'm late to the game, but I'd recommend Man Men to anyone that hasn't already seen it.