procrastinating

i will be the first one to admit that i am a vain person who'd rather show off her ability to post thoughts unmatched than do her homework.

but i haven't written for a while so i feel i must write something, vanity not withstanding.

first off. school has begun. today was the last day of week 2 and i think i've gotten a pretty good grasp of the situation. my french teacher is adept, but perhaps not savvy. my anthropology lecturer is an education in himself. my english (poetry) teacher is a crack up ("so, there was love...and sheep") but i dislike his methods. my linguistics teacher is a spaz. all in all, a quarter with some merit, although let me just say that i'm not exactly on top of things. i posted a criticque on the noteboard for my english class late and i only got an 84% on my first linguistic homework assignment. i suppose there's no hope for me getting straight A's if i don't care anymore. perhaps 8 weeks is long enough for me to recover. did i mention i have a draft for a paper due on monday?

Cornelia Funke is coming to the bookstore tomorrow to do a signing. yes, i know, you probably don't know who she is, but take my word for it, she's big. new york times bestseller for all five books. a fine writer. has been compared to JK Rowling and found intriguing. big.

a friend and i were talking about books before and after our linguistics lecture (yes, yes, we have already established that i am a nerd). she was saying how quickly her bookshelves filled up and i agreed. i told her the more bookshelves she gets, the more books she'll get to fill them up. she agreed and said that she thought the amount of books grew to fit the bookshelf just like a potted plant grows to fit the pot. we parted ways at the steps down to SSLH.

but the thought process hadn't left me just yet. i wondered what it was about the idea more. why people want more, why more seems better, why more seems necessary. "sometimes more is just more". even the idea that less is more is disagreeable. why do we always want more? the poetic answer would be "to fill the emptiness", but poetry is only a gaudy imitation of life. what's the real reason? maybe its the fact that everything is quantified these days. beanie babies come 6 in a bag. buy one get one free. 2 for a dollar. not to mention timecards and interest rates and gas prices. everything is numbers, everything that matters is counted. things like happiness and love are counted too. how many times have you been married? have you ever been in love? and the strange thing is that having more only breeds the desire for more until no one is ever content. i remember, freshman year of highschool, a classmate and i talked about the hours in a day. a lot of people think that there aren't enough hours in a day to do what one needs to do. though, this is true most of the time, i don't think a proper solution to this is to add more hours to a day--assuming that we could, which we can't. at first, the novelty of having more hours would be bliss: everyone could get their work done and still get a goodnight's sleep. but being human, i know this won't last long. gradually, people will begin to consider an inevitable, but logical conclusion. more hours in a day means more time to do more things. and before you know it, those extra hours will be filled with more activities until, again, we will complain that there aren't enough hours in a day. like my bookshelf and my friend's bookshelf: the more room there is, the more books we get until we are pining for another bookshelf. why is that?

i can't consider any theories because i have to do my homework sometime, but let me finish with this thought: be content with your present miseries (there's never enough room, there's never enough money, there's never enough time) and be wary of "more".