I’m Henry James, bitch REMIXXXXX

The days following my graduation have found me in a perpetual state of agitation. Right before commencement I got offered a job at a company in Midtown writing educational and professional work reports for people who are applying for green cards. Discovering that I had but one free week before being locked down in a 9 to 5 that will require a lot of overtime, I committed myself to finishing another draft of my screenplay, writing that article I’ve been meaning to about Kevin’s band and trying to get some writing samples ready for my supposed venture into freelancing. 

But instead, I found myself sitting on the couch staring straight ahead possessed by the near tangible apparition of My Life In The Future, which to me appeared as a series of crappy and frustrating low paying jobs, crappy and low rent apartments, a perpetual feeling of failure ergo never feeling fulfilled in any relationships that I may have.

In this spirit I found myself on the train staring straight ahead at an advertisement for the Philosophy Works workshops. Feeling depressed? Want to know the meaning of it all? Yes, yes I am and Yes I do. How did you know? But catching myself falling prey to this marketing scheme designed to take advantage of the marginally educated, I entered a state of reverie about the idea of philosophy in general. It was an aesthetic philosophy class in my sophomore year at School of Visual Arts that made me decide what I needed was a more diverse education and led me to transfer to Hunter. I was ass deep in philosophy for the rest of my time at SVA and in the interval in between my colleges. Then, all of a sudden, I wasn’t. And I realized that to think about life in the metalanguage that philosophy creates is to take some of the pleasant randomness and sense of disorder that really living life produces. Thinking a lot about life makes life unbearable to live, and I know this because I’ve spent a few days now sitting on my couch and thinking about it. 

Then for some reason I started to think about the 19th century. I’ve been pretty invested in the greatness that is the 19th century novel, mostly because the ones I like are about the class of people who sit around and talk about interesting things, agonize in their decisions and social obligations and who think a lot about a lot of things. Diego has equally been into the 19th century novel, which made me think that maybe Diego and I were made for the 19th century, when as he puts it, “women were women and men were women.” And just like some of the best 19th century novels, we will live our lives in obscurity.