the night before finals.

what a person needs and creates beyond habits and basic necessities becomes religion. this includes art, money, sex. homes become shrines. books become scripture. working out becomes ritual. ...conscious worship. i'm not sure that staying in bed all morning is a form of religious observance. there has to be some discipline. some religions, such as zen, are all discipline. i'm worshipping issac newton, numbers, and they aren't fulfilling me completely. numbers aren't usually beautiful to me, but there are brief exceptions.

taking a study break. kmfa started playing that sad erik satie song, reminding me of death. at 30 going on 31, i'm that much closer to death, compared to a normally-aged physics student, who would be, say, 20. the physics book does point out that the "psychological effects" of sound wave amplitude cause small increases in power to be detected as extremely large increases in loudness. it does not mention the psychological effects of hearing satie at 1:00 AM on a Sunday evening, with rain hitting the kitchen skylight.

my college term papers from the early 90s were submerged during a flood, but luckily the ink didn't completely run. i have a file of brittle, discolored papers representing my best thoughts when my mind was fresh and pliable. a long paper that i wrote about the gayl jones book, corrigedora, made the point that certain forms of psychosis preserve important links to the past. in the main character's case, she was able to bear witness to the injustices of slavery by remaining psychologically detached from men while she was a young woman. only as a much older woman do she and her romantic interest, a man named mutt, begin to relate to one another. it's an intriguing thought, still, that dysfunction might actually serve a purpose, and that old age might serve a purpose.