Things you realize in intellectual pursuits
I accidentally left the AC adapter to my Macbook at work Monday night. This left me with nothing to do Monday night, so I finally picked up a copy of Chuck Klosterman's brilliant Killing Yourself to Live loaned to me by one of my students. I didn't set it down until I'd finished it a few hours later.
Chuck Klosterman is probably the greatest living writer in America. 
He has aptly taken over for Hunter S. Thompson, despite having little in common with Thompson other than a penchant for road trips, drug abuse, and assignments from magazines to travel to odd places.
Hmm. So maybe they have a bit more in common than I thought. Yet Thompson was a true ethnographer, always capturing the very essence of what he experienced. Klosterman is a classic autoethnographer, and Killing Yourself is probably the greatest autoethnography written by a white, straight, middle-class (upbringing) Midwestern male in history.
Maybe I shouldn't have decided a white, straight, middle-class Midwestern male was incapable of writing good autoethnography. Maybe I coulda been a contendah.
ANYWAY, reading Klosterman makes a man (or woman, for that matter) realize two very important attributes about the people in their lives.
1. They make me much less happy than other people I could be spending time with.
2. They make me much less unhappy than other people I could be spending time with.
Note I did not say "one of two." I said two. Klosterman consistently makes me realize that bliss is nearly always accompanied by periods of misery, and to deprive one's self of both by engaging with individuals who take you to neither extreme is to deprive one's self of the emotional tension that's necessary to really interpret works of contemporary culture.
Klosterman generally leads me to the conclusion that everything I do is a waste of time, and I really ought to just spend more time listening to the Pixies by myself in my bedroom. And he's right, because he's always right.
BTW, if you're wondering how I typed this... i pulled the EW server out of the closet and installed X on it. It's never had X on it and I was quite content to keep things that way. Yet I really needed to check my email, as my phone doesn't work either. So I installed X.
Firefox 2.0 in Linux is the most gorgeous browser ever. Why can't it look like that on OS X? Or Windows, even?
