is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.

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OK. So I Went On A Date. But The Important Thing Is That You Should Read Cloud Atlas.

OK. So I Went On A Date. But The Important Thing Is That You Should Read Cloud Atlas.

The other day I asked my aging Magic 8 Ball whether I should throw it away. It said, �As I see it, yes.� So I did.

In other news, I went on a date on Sunday afternoon. It was fun. That�s all you get to hear for now. Except that, even though he asked me on three more dates during the course of the one date (aw, that�s cute), it is still unclear to me whether I will have a second date. You know how these things go. I�m not complaining. (Communication is fraught with uncertainty in the beginning stages of getting-to-know someone. It�s all negotiation and over-and-under-thinking. However, communication is fraught in general. More later.) Still, how many days ago was it that I was despairing over never being asked on a date? Four days. It is as if the universe is trying to ask me, �so, is this really the problem?� It is part of the problem, to be sure. So, I guess we can say� part of the problem: solved.

So, what else happened over the weekend, besides having a date and getting rocked by the cookie monster? Friday night I went over to Stephen�s house for a party which ended up being another night of me staying up late talking to guys about music. The party was composed of me, Stephen, Scout, Marco, Dave K. and Dave-Sonny. It was fun, and there was bourbon. In addition, the walk from the Ashby BART station in Berkeley to Stephen�s cute cottage is pleasant, and I took it during my favorite time of day� or is it night?� that time when it is actually neither, and the sky converts itself into all those different brilliant hues of blue, and objects begin to transform along with the quality of light. It was a good walk, full of lots of Berkeley smells good and bad: lilacs, urine, pine trees, greasy hamburgers, unwashed human bodies, patchouli, roses, night air, never a dull nostril moment. Little did my nostrils know that one day later they�d be full of cookie dust.

On Saturday afternoon Stephen came over from Berkeley and we went to see Wedding Crashers at the Metreon. We both laughed pretty hard fairly constantly throughout the movie, though we agreed afterward that it was only about 75% good and that it went on for too long. I recommend it if you have a sense of humor about the ludicrosity of dating and wedding-attending in general. There are some funny fast-paced jokey parts that make me want to see it again, though I doubt that�s going to happen.

Two times during the weekend a musician-type-guy was heard to complain that something like Cookie Mongoloid is not really music, but rather is a gimmick. I agreed insofar as I admitted that I wasn�t going to be buying the Cookie Mongoloid album and putting songs on mixed CDs to send to friends. However, I said this to both guys, and it is a statement that I very much hope will be quoted out of context: �Dude, just because you have a cookie monster head doesn�t mean you don�t ROCK!� Both of them were hard-pressed to refute such a sound argument.

I finished reading Cloud Atlas. The book is breathtaking. Its story is so good, and so amazingly varied in its forms, that you can scarcely believe all the parts are written by the same man. And the way he ties it together and then makes it just the right amount of heavy at the end is beyond my capability to describe just now. It isn�t until the final two pages that everything finally comes together�though you get clues all along�and it is unbelievable how succinctly the author states what is simultaneously the most brutal truth and the greatest hope human beings could have. I won�t say more because YOU SHOULD READ CLOUD ATLAS, every last page of its 509 pages.

There�s a way in which David Mitchell did with fiction what I tried to do with my dissertation. He did a much better job, do not get me wrong. All I�m saying is that it is a similar argument that gets made in a VERY different manner. (Also: Cloud Atlas is not perfect. I have complaints. But they are far outweighed by my love of the book and my thankfulness that it exists and that someone wrote it.) My dissertation is, thankfully, much shorter than 509 pages. But I fear it would read as if it were 8000 pages to anyone trying to get the same points out of it. Oh well. I�m getting better. And a book of philosophy or a work of political theory are not the same as a fictional narrative, and that is all good.

Most things worth saying need to be said in more ways than one, because communication is fraught with difficulty and misunderstanding. The human condition is defined by possibility, and also limitation. Beauty often results from how we negotiate between the two.

1:29 a.m. - July 19, 2005

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