I just re-finished Bill Bryson's Neither here nor There (the 're'-finished thing isn't worth the explanation). Anyway, it is an awesome read. Bryson is a brilliant writer, a very approachable sorta brilliance. He's the type of brilliant fellow who is perfectly at home drinking in a sports bar or fishing in an out-of-sight river. He doesn't get off on overly-poetic diction. He never tries to be too cute or too edgy. He just tells the truth.

Since I've removed myself from the future-lawyer/doctor/businessman/professional club it seems that being some sort of unpaid intellectual will be my future. Definitely soon to call that one, but I'm working under that assumption for the following thought(s). In my pursuit of becoming a well-paid quasi-thinker I have no hopes of being brilliant in the most typical sense. I don't hope to be what Zinn is to history, or Bloom to literature, or Talese to writing. My most earnest hope is to be a man who provides the truth, hopefully in an insightful and interesting manner. I hope to do this in whatever field I end up in, even if my field happens to be the wild and crazy world of food service. In this way I hope to be exactly the man Bill Bryson is.

Little quote that I, and probably you, can really relate to, at least the second half: "I was tired of the daily drudgery of keeping myself fed and bedded, tired of trains and buses, tired of existing in a world of strangers, tired of being forever perplexed and lost, tired above all of my own dull company. How many times in recent days had I sat trapped on buses or trains listening to my idly prattling mind and wished that I could just get up and walk on myself?"

I saw In Good Company tonight and it was very good. It was the first great movie I've seen in a long time that's greatness wasn't defined by unnecessary darkness and innane photography. You know the movies I'm talking about. The camera pans around at everything on the face of the planet besides the characters. You know why these 'great artistic films' do this??? Because there is nothing else for them to do. There is no plot or characters for the movie-goer to watch, so the director provides them with those types of images that come to mind when listening to The Dark Side of the Moon. Yeah you know. And people just gush over that shit, and sometimes so do I--to impress girls. Um yeah, whatever. In Good Company is really good in the best way possible.

In a slightly related note Scarlett Johansson is beautiful. The word beautiful doesn't even come close. Just watching her makes me put both hands over my heart (or where my heart would be if I weren't an emotional vacuum of a man who is looking on on life I may be doomed never to find, anyways) ...hands on my chest, sorta lean back in my chair a little bit, look up into space and pray to God that I'll ever be worthy of anyone as perfect as Scarlett Johansson. Usually, I'm not this way. I'm never this way.

It's been so long since I've talked to a girl and thought 'you are so beautiful in every way, I'd love to be with you'. There have been a few girls who I've seen and thought 'you are beautiful, I'd love to have sex with you and then brag to my friends about it'. But no such luck for the first thing--the talking part, at least in awhile. And I guess Scarlett Johansson reminds me that women like her do exist--the girl you can start a conversation with and by the end you're in love with her. Not that I don't have plenty of women in my life who I could have these 'love-inducing' conversations with, but, for whatever reason, it didn't work that way. It's just nice to know that I'm not already on the friends ladder of every girl I could fall in love with, or something like that. Who knows what I'm saying. I need a good long surf.

Life is really poorly designed. It's insane to expect people do decide what they're going to do as a life-long career at 20 years old. Insane I say. It's also insane that I won't get word from the UCs for 109 loooong days.

I have been a posting machine.