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11:13 p.m. - 2008-03-11
I AM GIVING CANCER LOW SELF-ESTEEM

I am very very bad at celebrity spotting. On the best of days, I am not terribly aware of my surroundings, and if I do notice something in particular, it tends to be a small, unimportant detail that has some sort of special significance and/or freak appeal to me. Perhaps the most obvious example of this took place a few years ago, when I was walking through Tribeca with a friend, and she suddenly nudged me and whispered 'look' while gesturing at this couple. I looked, and spent a solid 2-3 minutes trying to figure out why the grunge-y guy with the long beard looked so familiar to me. When I finally admitted to my friend that I couldn't place him, she looked at me like I was insane. 'That's the lead singer of the Black Crowes. And if you look to the right, that's Kate Hudson'.

Oh, right. Don't know how I missed her.

In any case, I had a similar experience a few days ago when I was leaving the coffee shop on the ground floor of the Classic Stage Company, which is currently putting on The Seagull. Now, I know Alan Cumming and Diane Wiest are starring in this play. I also knew that Alan Cumming was running late, and should be arriving any moment. Which is why it is weird that when, a few minutes later, I spotted an oddly familiar looking guy hurrying towards the theater, I spent a solid twenty minutes trying to figure out where I knew him from.

The moral of this story is this: I was in the same coffee shop today, and I successfully recognized Diane Wiest! Thanks, TNT Law&Order marathons!

That rambling bunch of nonsense and this diary entry in general is really nothing more than a blatant attempt to put off writing my paper on Madame Bovary, which is pathetic because it only has to be 1-2 pages long (ie, shorter than this diary entry will probably end up being). Besides, I fully intend to focus on the horrific eroticization of the insane guy with no eyelids. Sexual assault and eyeball ooze - how boring can it possibly be?*

I don't really know how to transition out of that, so I will do it by referring to my inability to do so, and then moving on.

I was in the bathroom today (oh, this is going even more poorly than I imagined) and taped to the door of the stall was a poster for Relay For Life. The library computer labs that have scanners are already closed for the night, so I can't actually post the image (yes, I stole the poster), but the gist is that my college is hosting a campaign where people wear purple strings as bracelets to indicate that their lives have been somehow affected by cancer. Got it. Raising awareness through strings makes sense if a fund-raising marathon is coming up. The part that really got my attention, though, were the last two lines, which read:

"It is our goal to have as many people as possible wearing one. We will be keeping a running tally of the total, so keep an eye out on campus and wear yours proudly!"

Ok, the first sentence is awkwardly phrased, but I get it. The second, on the other hand, is hugely problematic for me. First of all, my college is GIGANTIC. Unless everyone is receiving their purple string from some unspecified official string-bracelet distributor, I have no idea how the organizers of this campaign think their going to keep track of participation. But, and more importantly, "wear yours proudly"? Not that you should be ashamed to know someone with cancer, obviously, but there are a other words that would seem more appropriate there. "In solidarity" seems like a good option. "Proudly" just seems a little "Yea, cancer!" to me.

Man, I am just a font of irrelevancies and inappropriateness today. It think it may be time to go.

In conclusion, I would just like to say "horseballs"**. The epithet, not the objects. If I plan to be in the library after midnight, I always try to plan ahead and get to one of the 24-hour lower levels at about 11:30, in order to get a good seat before all of the upstairs floors close and everyone gets herded down. Tonight I forgot, and now I'm going to have to finish studying in a shitty plastic chair instead of in a comfortable-if-squeaky grey armchair. Boo.

-Britt


*Answer: Very. If you do not know that, then you have obviously never taken a college literature course. But I'm going to try to make mine as un-boring as possible, while still being Critically Rigorous, of course.
**You do not even want to know how long it took me to decide whether or not to put horseballs in quotes. No one could see me fiddling with it, and I was still embarrassed.


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