i felt for a while like i could cry. i was crying earlier, finishing bee season. i'd expected that to be light reading -- why? it's beautiful and i must have sniffled through the last 30 pages of it. afterwards stef and i argued whether there was some sort of redemption or happiness to be found in the ending. it came down to a simple pessimist / optomist dichotomy.

if anyone called me a pessimist, i'd be hurt. last night, however, i did have a moderately fatalistic attitude towards the water in which i was supposed to eventually put buckwheat pasta but which felt very acutely to me as though it would never boil, never, not if i stood there for the entire night.
you'll never be a good cook if you think fatalistically, said rebecca.
don't tell her she'll never be a good cook!, said ben.
i laughed. they were both right.

my job at planet elaineum fell through. it turned out that my prospective boss was crazy, and also that she was my cousin eric's second grade teacher (my aunt, reminded of the woman cried, "she's crazy!"). i was willing to work with her anyway, even for only $5 an hour, because i'm a sucker for crazy old jewish women, or at least i feel like i can deal with them.
but then ben, at whose house i would have to live to commute to planet elaineum, got this great job in brooklyn for those two days a week. so he'll live in brooklyn, i'll live in brooklyn, he'll make $25 an hour, and i'll continue wandering around my posh, beautiful neighborhood, wondering what i'm going to do with the rest of my life.

or even the present of my life. i expected new york city to incite in me feelings of: inferiority, self-doubt, mediocrity, low self-esteem, and/or perhaps bitterness. (see Fatalism, above) i didn't expect to thoroughly enjoy the city but find myself intermittently awash in an existential crisis. how will i make my million? is the general question. the more focused beginning is, how will i make any money at all, or does it matter, and should i just concentrate on the research? then, after that's done, after i write the screenplay i'm supposed to write, and graduate with the degree i'm supposed to graduate with, and become the person i'm supposed to become, then, THEN, i'll figure out: how will i make my million?