Stay up late watching TV. Since you can’t afford HBO or Netflix, you’re going to have to endure a lot of commercials unless you use my trick of checking out DVDs from the library. Staying up cuddling with your remote tonight paves the way for hours of unconsciousness tomorrow.
Go to a coffee shop at 3:00 in the afternoon to apply for jobs and find it packed. Wonder how people actually make a living here. Everyone always talks about a new exciting project in the works and drives a BMW, but they’re still hanging out at Coffee Bean in the middle of the afternoon with nothing to do. Something isn’t quite right here.
Almost Transparent Blue (1976) was written by Ry? Murakami (b. 1952) while he was a student at Musashino Art University, where he was enrolled in the sculpture program. It was his first novel and was awarded the Akutagawa Prize (Japan’s “most sought after” literary prize; previous winners include Kobo Abe and Kenzaburo Oe) and sold ~1.2 million copies (~1% of Japan’s population at-the-time) in six months.
Popular themes for internet cat pictures suggest that the cat is perplexed by his/her environment; the cat is demanding of something in a regal fashion [cats may often be implied to be ‘overlords’ or ruling-class characters from science-fiction movies]; the cat is excited to have succeeded at something while remaining oblivious to the practicality of his/her accomplishment.
A girl who reads possesses a vocabulary that can describe that amorphous discontent as a life unfulfilled—a vocabulary that parses the innate beauty of the world and makes it an accessible necessity instead of an alien wonder.
She was immersed in things I’d only heard of before, like Debutantes, season tickets to the Orange County Performing Arts Center, new Volvo sedans, Pescetarianism, Whole Foods, art show openings, family alumni in Ivy League universities, famous relatives who were active or once active in the art world…
Such moments become fiercely guarded, protected and cherished memories and subsequently, the recall of such memories is often the precursor to small mental breakdowns, large mental breakdowns, and evolution-of-a-relationship montages in movies, specifically circa 1980 and 1990.
During this time the individual will have several windows open, generally several browser ‘tabs,’ a Microsoft Word document in some state of incompletion, the individual’s own Facebook page as well as that of another randomly-selected individual who may or may not be on the ‘friends’ list, 2-5 Gchat conversations that are no longer immediately active, possibly iTunes and a ‘client’ for Twitter.