11:50 pm I know more now about why I hate writing for display to the whole class. I wouldn't have worried about it when I was in high school, when I was convinced I was God's gift to writing and the rest of my peers sucked (which, when I was in a class without any of my friends in it, they invariably did). Now I'm facing a tougher, smarter crowd, so I want to tuck tail between my legs and just trot my essay directly into the hands of the teacher. For the most part I don't worry about what the teacher thinks, with the exception of times when I get complexes about how much I admire the teacher for their greatness. Mostly I see teachers as all-forgiving. Like therapists. They know I'm working hard and trying my best to develop my understanding of things, and their job is to give me constructive criticism, not to savage me. My fellow students have no such mandate.

12:48 It is the presence of roommates which leads me to stand in the kitchen asking myself "Donut? Or sandwich?" If I was living alone, there would be no question; there would be no donuts. How did the donuts get here, anyway? I think it was an accident of conversation that they even came up. I don't think any of us really wanted them. But we got a dozen.

It was a good sandwich, though. Fake chicken, feta, cheddar and tomato on toasted "Southwestern Flatbread." The "flatbread" is a global citizen, sold in the same kind of package as the "Tandoori Naan" and made by someone with a Greek name. Still it's pretty good, and I don't even like jalapenos. I had blueberry pomegranate juice to go with. I think perhaps I am getting a little too fucking fancy.

12:50 An hour later I have still not managed to get around the holes in my understanding of why the development of modern concepts of simultaneity are mutually exclusive with medieval notions of time based on divine causality, have more or less erased and rewritten the same paragraph five times, and am not any closer to answering the question of the sociopolitical roles of novels and newspapers in modern societies.

2:53 Got distracted by things I wanted to buy on the internet, and their associated cartoons.

People around me at school are talking about hitting a wall. I feel it too. The excellent work zen that kept me away from people and immersed in my books for the first half of the semester has flickered out. I read and read and yet I can't get things to stay in my head. I have also lost the ability to go to bed around midnight which I so carefully cultivated while I was working, and it gets later and later and I find that I just can't bring myself to sleep. The things I originally intended to be doing are lost in a screenful of other browser windows and I have convinced myself I will not finish them tonight even though I devoted a good chunk of the evening to them and don't want to spend more time on them tomorrow.

* * *

Oh, fuck it all, I might as well just blog. What else of note has happened lately... For the second time in my life I had a professor tell me to put away my laptop during a lecture the other day. It was a man who was apparently central to founding the Communications, Computing, and Technology Department. He said the laptop was distracting. I told him I was taking notes. (I was. I also had iChat open, because those of us with Rendezvous wanted to talk about using video games to teach, and we felt pretty sure the lecture was going to be tedious and irrelevant.) He told me to get out a notebook. I didn't have a notebook. I don't carry them; I have my laptop so I can put my notes someplace where they will be indexable easily, and I won't have a billion notebooks to schlep around the next time I move.

He gave up, and returned to a lecture that was so completely irrelevant, disorganized, and marked by technical failures that the guy next to me started calculating how much money we'd wasted on it.

Most of the other folks closed their laptops. I left mine open despite the fact there was now nobody to talk with and nothing to take notes on; the quintessence of a wasted classroom. I played a very keen game of Scrabble with Christine online, and lost. I feel sorry for the professor. It's his department, after all; I imagine the irony was not lost on him, and that kind of thing just doesn't look good when it happens in a large public forum.

For the record, the first person to tell me to get rid of a laptop during a lecture was Michael "I only like pictures of turn-of-the-century technology" Lesy, who pronounced "The machine MUST GO," with associated dramatic gesture.