Finals

Finals got you down?




Yeah...... Me too.

It's all in her tone...

Elevator Etiquette

Making it through an elevator ride with a stranger.

 

Falling off the wagon is never good.

I'm not very good at school.

I'm "writing a paper" right now, but I've been interneting so hard the last few days that all I want to do is draw silly cartoons.

Body v. Brain - Insomnia Round 1. Ding!

This has been going on every night for the past 2 weeks or so.

Body: Hey, I'm pretty tired. We haven't really slept in a few days.
Brain: Well, I'm too busy thinking of stuff to sleep. Quit being such a sissy.
Body: You're always like this. "I'm the brain here. I run this shit. I'm gonna boss you around, control your limbs, and not worry about what kind of consequences it has for you."
Brain: I know I seem like that sometimes, but I think I'm onto something here.
Body: Oh, I'm sure you are. Why can't you ever have one of your oh-so-earth-shattering epiphanies before 3 A.M.?
Brain: I mean it this time. I think I've figured out what I'm going to do with us after school.
Body: That sounds promising. I hope it allows you to stop making me drink so much whenever you want to "think."
Brain: Yeah, yeah. Now why don't you do some of that moving around stuff and go get us a cup of coffee?
Body: If you think it will help. I really could use some sleep though.
Brain: THINK, dummy. If you get us coffee, I can trick you so you won't feel tired anymore.
Body: Fine. I'll do it.

Anyway, I drink coffee, stay up forever, and generally get nothing real done.

Tomorrowland

      With the season four finale of Mad Men looming like the last day of summer vacation this Sunday night, I started to look back at the most recent episode as well as forward to the next one.  Sterling Cooper Draper Price has been under crisis since losing the Lucky Strike account, and Don pulled the old Don-did-something-really-ballsy-and-we’ll-all-just-wait-and-see-if-it-works-move.
      It started after leaving the office one day and a chance encounter with old flame, Midge, in the lobby. They catch up a bit, and Don accompanies her to her apartment. She wants him to buy one of her paintings, but while she’s out of the room, her husband slips up and tells Don that she was so excited that she was finally able to track him down.  It turns out that Midge is addicted to heroin and struggling to get by.  Don hands her a wad of cash, takes a painting, and leaves. 
     Later, Phillip Morris cancels a previously scheduled meeting with SCDP and gives their women’s brand cigarette account to another agency.  The partners are obviously disappointed, and Don is furious.  He yells something about how they all smell of desperation, and that clients are taking notice.  
     Cut to Don in his dour Greenwich Village apartment, staring at Midge’s abstract painting.  He starts a new journal entry, “Why I’m Quitting Tobacco” and (of course) lights another cigarette.  In it, he explains that SCDP will no longer advertise for companies that sell tobacco, a product that never improves, whose users can’t quit, and causes sadness.  He goes on to explain that he views the termination of their relationship with Lucky Strike as an opportunity to sleep better at night. 

    We find out the next morning that Don ran the journal entry as a full-page ad in the New York Times.  The other partners, to their chagrin, learn that Don has sworn the agency off of all tobacco accounts.  They accuse Don of throwing a tantrum, and Cooper actually resigns, saying on his way out that they’ve all “created a monster” in Don.  Don defends himself by saying that he did something, and that he is the only one who has.  
     All of that news aside, the firm still has to begin making layoffs.  Those that remain, like Peggy, do their best to work while others sob and gather up their things.  The episode closes on Don opening the door to his office to another employee, the random employee going in, Don pausing at the door to contemplate the scene around the office, and finally entering the office to fire another man.
     I talked to a friend about Don’s ad in the Times and whether it really is just an ad for the firm, like Don said to the partners, or he really meant it.  I really think that our Don meant it.  For me, and I think for Don, ruminating over Midge’s painting and her situation are what inspired the journal entry.  I mean, when he found out about her addiction, he asked her why she doesn’t just quit.  She said something like “I can’t, its heroin.”  After that, even while Don handed her the cash, we got the feeling that any feelings of his pity for her were crushed by an overwhelming amount of disgust.  He saw what heroin did her and realized that he was selling addiction because of his and the company’s addiction to money.  This season, we’ve watched Don Draper’s signature habits catch up to him, and I think that just maybe we’ve seen him hit bottom. Maybe the ad was a turning point in Don’s character.  Are we going to see redemption become part of Don’s arc? Everything I know about Mad Men says no, but a guy can hope, right?
The title of next week’s finale is “Tomorrowland.”  When I found that out, something piqued my memory.  My first thought was of Disneyland, you know, the Magic Kingdom has a section that has the same name, or something like that.  That wasn’t exactly what I was thinking, so obviously I googled it, and through the magic of Google found what I was looking for.  “Tomorrowland” is a song from the film “An Affair to Remember” starring Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr.  Here is a taste of the lyrics:

There’s a wonderful place called tomorrowland
And it’s only a dream away
And the moment you get to tomorrowland
You’ll forget about today. You’ll be walking on clouds,
You’ll forget every care,
And your troubles, like bubbles, will vanish in air
Ask me how do you get to tomorrowland
Close you eyes, make a wish and you’re there

     That gives me some sense of hope for the season finale.  It’s going to take a lot more than a wish for Don to get there, but either way, I know I’ll be watching.

Summer.doc

I was just going through my computer, cleaning up my desktop, organizing some files, ya know, avoiding homework, and I found this.  I remember writing it last summer.  It started as a (slightly inebriated) stream-of-consciousness, and turned into the thing I worry about once every few months.  It also appears that I gave up and went back to bed when I reached the point where I’d really have to figure out what I was talking about.  It seems appropriate that I found it tonight because I’ve been having that old, familiar tingle of self-loathing that usually comes from the fact that I don’t have a clue about what I’m going to do with my life.  It would be great if I even had an idea about what I *want* to do with it, at least that would be something. Also, sorry for the buzzkill.  

TL;DR  - Found this.  It’s a bummer.  I sort of suck.

***

He lay there, awake in bed.  She was already sleeping, and it was not unusual that she fell asleep before him.  Falling asleep was always a challenge for him, he just wished that sleeping next to her would change that.  Not to say that there was anything remotely wrong with her, rather that she was the one shining light in his life. 
    The rest of it was a mess, especially if you asked him.  There he was, at the summer before his senior year of college, his whole life ahead of him.  This is what everything up until this point in his life was supposed to be preparing him for, right?  Elementary school prepared us for high school which prepared us for college.  College was supposed to prepare us for real life.  His problem is that he still felt like a child, a twenty-one year old boy.  That’s what he was.  All around him in class he saw the future leaders of the world.  Goldman Sachs.  Deliotte.  KPMG. Booz-Allen.  His classmates aspired to run hedge funds and  have nice, big houses in nice, gated communities.  His classmates could answer any question posed in class, while he struggled to get by.  This isn’t an underdog story though.  He could answer the questions, if only he’d put in the time.  He didn’t put in the time because he didn’t care.  Not about those questions.  “If a certain asset has possible cashflows x,y, and z in the future…”  He could figure out the value of your asset, real or financial.  He knew how to discount future cash flows, use DCF valuation, or use comps to value a company or figure out its stock price. 
    He could do this because he was a finance major.  He entered college as an engineer, but after realizing engineering entailed mostly writing code to optimize something, he got out.  So he joined the business school, because everyone knows you’ll never own a yacht if you have a liberal arts education.  Freshman year went pretty smoothly, him knocking out university and college requirements and making new friends.  He played Halo. He stayed in the dorms.  He drank 40’s at four on football Fridays.  He helped friends sneak girls in. 
    She broke up with him.  Too many new friends, too few phone calls.  The road got a little rough.  He hung around the bottom of bottles most of the time.  Sometimes he’d call her and make it worse by saying he’d be better.  He felt sorry for himself and numbed the pain.  Killed the pain most of the time.  It wasn’t so bad.  He managed to keep it together in school for the most part.  He spent the summer dealing with new issues with mom and dad.  The college kid came home and had to deal with rules again.  The rules didn’t go over that great , but they all got by.  He worked construction on the pipeline with real men.  It was a whirlwind of a summer.  Pipeline by day, party by night.  Get up and do it all over again.  Sophomore year wasn’t much different.  Good friends became great friends, and yeah, he got a lot closer to the people too.  The business school told him to pick a major, so he went with finance because the really smart kids said that it was the best one.  So, he went through the motions.  He got a fake ID.  He smoked cigarettes and played pool until four in the morning at Club 23.  He saw jersey chasers catch up to football players at CJ’s.  He blacked out at Fever.  He drank mostly because it was fun, and hey what else was there to do?  Cut to another summer of beer and life on the pipeline that fades right into junior year.  He moved off campus so he didn’t have to break the way too strict rules of the dorm that put such a damper on all the fun.  He lived in the apartment that looked and smelled more like a bar. School started slipping.  The reasons he was there became less clear to him. 

Sums Up Our Relationship

Her: I think I broke my elbow. It hurts
Me: Oh no. How?
Her: I tripped.
Me: I promise I won't laugh until I know you're ok.
Her: Fuck you.
Me: I miss you. I wish we could sleep together tonight so you could push me away and stick a pillow between us.
Her: Awww, me too.

Just an average phone call between Girlfriend and I