Ephemera

A couple of notes, all of them oscillating wildly on my own personal relevance scale:

1. My buddy Greg just started a blog here, that I am both obliged and delighted to link to. It's good to have someone else to link to, to be honest. Though it might seem bizarre given that there are seemingly millions of blogs created every second, the blogosphere can be an awfully lonely place with little discursive reward unless you really whore yourself out like Perez Hilton or Drudge or whomever. Greg, by the way, played McCullough in "Dino & McCullough: The Legend Begins," if you haven't seen that yet. I have a big role in it as well, as an erratic homosexual police chief.

I think Mendy needs to get a blog, too, if only to expound on some of the more mystifying choices he made in his top ten list, like the Hold Steady, and explain why he puts Nick Cave so low on his list.

2. My predictions regarding Secret Invasion: strangely, not that far off, at least compared to the complete misfire that was my prediction for Civil War. If you recall, I claimed that the Skrulls would win the fight by detonating the Wasp using whatever growth formula the fake Hank Pym gave her, and would take out the rest of the group with the help of Norman Osborn. I was wrong in that respect: the Skrulls got their asses handed to them (and, judging from what I've read in the latest issue of New Avengers, Bendis still seems to have no moral qualms with annihilating the remainder of Earth's Skrull populace, with extreme prejudice), but Norman still got to look like the hero while Tony Stark ran off, and now he is running not S.H.I.E.L.D. or S.W.O.R.D. but a new organization called H.A.M.M.E.R., which I believe is an acronym yet to be determined. I was right that the Wasp died, but I was wrong in predicting that Jessica Jones would die trying to save her baby from Skrull-Jarvis: instead, Skrull-Jarvis just ran off with the baby, which I think is a pretty ballsy move on Bendis' part, to leave the possibility of infanticide as a dangling plot thread. Unfortunately, this still doesn't explain why Norman Osborn knew what was going on with Captain Marvel when he barged into Thunderbolts mountain, which is one of many inconsistencies and gaffes in this book. The Dark Avengers, as far as I can tell, won't be Skrulls but rather Norman Osborn's Thunderbolt's rejiggered as classic Avengers. From what I can guess, you got Moonstone as Ms. Marvel, Bullseye as Hawkeye, Venom as Spider-Man (how is he going to pull off not having the tongue thing?), and Osborn himself as the new "Iron Patriot," alongside Wolverine's son Daken, Marvel Boy, the Sentry, and Ares.

I'm actually pretty pumped for what might happen in "Dark Reign," particularly with Tony Stark now on the run from the government and Osborn having a government sanctioned band of grade-A psychos as his nu-new Avengers. However, I'm actually more interested right now in what has been going on with Final Crisis, which has managed to be blowing my mind further and further as Secret Invasion has gotten more and more formulaic. That comic is being written by Grant Morrison, one of my favorite comic writers, and after reading the entirety of his Seven Soldiers and seeing how it relates to what's going on now, I've realized that Morrison is basically recasting the entirety of the DC universe in his own crazy, narcotics-enhanced vision--this is entirely a good thing. In the future, I need to devote an entire post to the oeuvre of Morrison, which I find I can't get enough of these days.

3. My own top ten list is forthcoming. I'm in the midst of reading through all of Infinite Jest right now--my one goal for the break--and as expected, it's taking a while.

4. My father got two DVDs for Chanukah the other day, 24-Hour Party People and Joy Divison (not Control, the fictional Anton Corbijn movie, but the documentary that was released with it). I am extremely jealous, but I got a book of Tobias Wolff short stories, so I'm good for now.

5. Philip Roth project is going fine, I got 25+ pages with it and my sponsor seems happy with it. I had somewhat of a hurdle getting it past certain members of faculty who took umbrage with my lack of specificity, which is a problem with my writing I always have as well.

6. Just quickly, I want to gauge if there's any interest if I were to put some short stories of my own writing up here. Actually, more generally I want to see if I can gauge any response regarding anything at all.

7. Finally, R.I.P. Harold Pinter, one of those guys that really did deserve a Nobel Prize for literature. I remember buying a copy of The Room and The Birthday Party and enjoying them very much, and now (as I am wont to do whenever an author dies) I am inclined to read more.

There's no way you will be interested in this

My class schedule for next year, for those of you interested. In case you are confused, I go to a liberal arts school that's divided into nine "blocks," which translates into four classes one semester and five in the other. Looking back on my college career, I am proud to say that I never took a block off, and I never skipped class, not even when I was sick (not that I ever got sick). Unfortunately, the days when one got rewarded for this are now over, and I have to depend on my intellect to reap me benefits. I'm screwed.

1. Senior Seminar: Colonial Literature and Postcolonial Theory
2. Intermediate French
3. American Survey
4. Virginia Woolf
5. Jazz Improvisation
6. Topic: Who Owns Music? The Practice and Politics of Musical Borrowing
7. Advanced Critical Writing
8. Race, Sex, and the Constitution
9. Critical Theory

I know what you are thinking: Is this Sacks guy so hardcore that he is going to end his college career with Critical Theory? Damn right. I couldn't fit it anywhere else.

Some other notes:
-Regarding Intermediate French, I'm screwed. Part of a liberal arts education is that you need to take a requisite number of classes outside your major, which includes a language. Technically the only class you need to pass is one language class at the 205 level, but unfortunately you need to either make it through three beginning classes or pass into a higher level by taking a test at the beginning of freshman year. I passed into French 103, which meant I would have to take two classes. I took 103 back freshman year, but for numerous reasons I have had to keep pushing back when I would take 205. Now, I don't remember any French. This is bad news. I feel especially bad considering the amount of friends, particularly from high school, who have gone and lived in other countries and learned other languages. For some reason, I have tried to remain willfully ignorant of other languages, in part because I never really liked the French language to begin with. I wonder why I never went abroad, anywhere. I guess I couldn't imagine leaving my little liberal arts alcove, but now I'm gonna have to leave, or end up like Eric Stoltz in Kicking and Screaming (see that movie if you haven't).


-Jazz Improvisation is looking to be somewhat hardcore, although I'm sure I can take it way better than most people. I wonder if my teacher will be down for some jazz fusion in the form of, I dunno, Jeff Beck's Blow By Blow.

-I'm only taking Virginia Woolf because it's with the master of all things Woolf, and at Cornell there are disappointingly few classes devoted to a singular author (one on Milton, if I remember, and two on Shakespeare).

-I found out not long ago that a professor of some repute who recently left Cornell (and whose name is not really that googleable but I will withhold it, just in case), talked a bunch of shit about me to a friend of mine. He took great issue with my article on Mark Steyn, which angers me only because I consider that article/interview to be the only worthwhile thing I did on that paper, and he proceeded to tear me up for not being sufficiently critical of Steyn and Cornell for inviting a public speaker that a) didn't have old-school scholarly credentials, and b) maintained that multiculturalism is a deterrent on American progress. I felt like writing an angry E-Mail but I abstained, as surely he is a far superior rhetoritician. Still, I swear to God, if I were ever to become a professor I would not end up being a knee-jerk peacenik like so much of the faculty. I mean at least they can entertain a speaker's presence for a day or so.
-Jesse Helms was a prick.

Also, I need to consider giving this blog a bit more oomph. Those who have known me or seen me will understand when I say I have no concept of visual aesthetics, and I will pay someone to help redesign (and maybe get a guest blogger up in here, anyone interested?*) If some of my bloggier friends (Mendy, Jim, Ricky) want to work something out I would be glad and somewhat relieved.

Oh yeah, since Mendy posted a link to my last.fm meme I am bound by my code of honor to do the same for him: Here. I think his answers ended up being a lot more interesting then mine, but then he got lucky.

*Not Juell.

Reconciling myself

Well, I certainly dropped the ball on this thing. I was seized, unfortunately, by one of those Salinger (or Residents!) moments where I felt like being a bit more anonymous. In fact, I don't even know what I'm trying to do right now. I'll give you a brief lowdown on what you may have missed, had you not been present during every moment of my life and don't happen to be a nu-nu. This is in relatively chronological order.

-On what I believe was 4/20, I delivered my symposium project on Philip Roth. Entitled "Telling a Man by the Songs He Sings: Claims and Counterclaims of Anti-semitism in Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus and Letting Go," I had spent the last several months, reading through as much of Roth's work as I could while simultaneously producing a 15-page paper that my sponsor would find of enduring quality. Luckily, she didn't find my thesis or anything I said to be that bad (I was probably helped by the fact that, even as an American literature professor, and a Jew to boot, she wasn't that familiar with Roth). Of course, the day before I had to pare down the fucking thing to a manageable 10 minutes. It turns out that reading my entire 15-page paper took something like 25 minutes, so I spent all of Friday hacking it until I was pretty sure I had produced something utterly unintelligible. No matter: very, very few people showed up. I would wager there were maybe 10 people there, and that includes the three students also speaking during my session (entitled "Literary Landscapes: Paradise, Politics, and Religion"--check out my abstract and stuff here) and their respective sponsors, although my sponsor couldn't be there because, irony of ironies, she had to go home for Passover.

Anyhow, I finally did it, and at least my moderator seemed to like it, and was particularly impressed that I did all the research outside of class. I asked her if (as department chairman) this would be good to go as an honors thesis, and she said yes. So at that point I was pretty happy.

-All of the internships I applied for--and I won't bother naming them all here--turned me down. Every single last one of them. So, faced with few other ideas, I decided to go back home once again for the summer. Turns out this was a bad idea.

-I did, however, receive an academic award from the school, which was cool because along with the prestige (I'm aware, don't laugh at me) of it I got $100. It was the Winifred Van Etten award, in case you were wondering. It's not a big deal, there are enough of these to make me feel not so special. Still, it was nice, particularly because I had no idea what I was getting until it was announced at the English awards/Open Field party. Mouton, or someone in the English department wrote a lovely introduction for me too. The only reason I enjoyed it was because it was poetic justice for none of my stuff getting into Open Field, which is the campus literary magazine. This is even though Freeman thought one of my stories was good enough to be entered into the Nick Adams short story contest (which I lost unsurprisingly, although I should add deservedly--I read the story that won, and it is actually an amazing piece of work). Apparently, my peers didn't think anything I did was good enough. I was depressed, but that made it a bit better.

Weirdly, I was invited to attend the English awards night as well as the interdepartmental awards night. Since I had already gotten my award previously, I was just asked to stand up to be recognized. There was no reason why I should have gone. The whole thing was like three hours and nearly unbearable, despite what was supposed to be fancy food. Apparently, there are a lot of awards here.

-Got hired to be the new Arts & Entertainment editor of The Cornellian, which, unlike my job back in high school, actually pays a salary. I was going for Opinions editor but I'm not surprised that they didn't choose me. To date, I have written pieces about the new Portishead album, the new R.E.M. album, and Iron Man. As is custom, the new editorial staff does one issue at the very end of the year, and it ended up not going so well for me as the result of some advertising mishaps, so I basically had to do the whole thing over again. The result: an epic piece on Iron Man that took up the entire page. It wasn't my proudest moment, and it was sort of another reason to be depressed. I couldn't look at it afterwards, that was for sure.

-I saw Iron Man. Loved it. I don't think my review is online, but I'll post it at some point.

-Took two classes, both of which fucked me up in unexpected ways: Grammar & The Politics of English turned out to be a mind-blowingly frustrating class, although not so much with the politics part as it was with the grammar. I don't know if anyone here has ever had to diagram sentences. I certainly hadn't before, but now I can say that it is a loathsome, disgusting, and surprisingly helpful activity. I think I am a better writer for taking the class, and it was sort of nice to have a professor who didn't like anything I did at all. I definitely needed that, but too bad it killed my straight-A winning streak for the semester. I'm not as concerned with that as I am with the way I was demoralized--somehow, even as someone with enough knowledge and passion of issues pertaining to language politics and linguistics, I found I had little of value to say. I did, however, get to do a paper on Salman Rushdie, who readers will know I am a big fan of. I think my thesis was something like the Ayatollah couldn't have possibly read The Satanic Verses before he issued his fatwa, and he definitely didn't read it afterward either. I know, it's so obvious. Story of my life.

Contrast this with Contemporary Fiction, a class I owned unequivocally. I found, astonishingly, that I was more in my element doing literary analysis, and what's more, I found myself enjoying the theory--yes, the theory--of postmodernists like Jean Baudrillard and Roland Barthes. Plus, we got to read some wonderful books, including one of my favorites, If on a winter's night a traveler. We also read Breakfast of Champions and J.M. Coetzee's Foe, amongst selections from a big Norton anthology of postmodern literature from the likes of Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Sherman Alexie, Marilynne Robinson, Maxine Hong Kingston, and others. Philip Roth was in the anthology (excerpting The Ghost Writer) but we did not read him in class. I felt very much on top of things and was very proud of the writing I did in the class. In fact, I feel like I might put it on here, except it doesn't seem that profound on the internet as it did in the classroom. Anyway, my professor seemed to like it, and me, a lot. I think he liked that I would actually talk about some of the postmodern theory while most would complain it was impenetrable. As he would likely say, that's the point.

-I keep chugging away at Philip Roth. Just finished Deception, by the way, so I'm entering the home stretch. In my next post I'll talk about The Counterlife through Exit Ghost, assuming I can remember anything about them.

-I ended my junior year by doing my take-home final while having an extreme headache, and later, after attending quarter draws night at the bar, getting extremely feverish. Also, I hate packing and I knew I would miss my roommate, Jeremiah, although I'll see him again next year.

-Came home for the summer. The drive back was excruciating. Not only was I feeling extremely sick, to the point where I couldn't eat anything, but it was raining as hard as I've ever seen, to the point where I couldn't really see on the road. It was risky business, but I made it home okay. I've looked, in vain, for a job. It's hard, because pretty much everything has been filled up by people who came back for summer long before I did, as a result of Cornell ending pretty late. I need money and I don't know what to do.

So that's it. I'll get back into the swing of things, slowly. My question is this: from reading this, does this constitute a life well-lived? Obviously I'm not including stuff that is personal, but let's just say that that part is covered. Am I doing enough with my life? What should I be doing? What am I doing wrong?

Been a long time

Sorry I haven't been updating this much. There are several reasons why this is, not the least because I was just in an incredibly busy class that I didn't know if it was proper to write about it, what with my name being so Googleable these days. I was just in a class called Reading in the Content Area, which is basically an Education class in which we studied different literacy theories, some of which I can definitely say have more value than others. Part of my class was actually going to a high school every day for two weeks, from 8-11 on every weekday except Friday, when I would spend the whole day there. This turned out to be an exhausting process. I was very unsure about whether I would blog about it, considering there are all sorts of privacy issues regarding my fellow teachers and students, and what's more I'm not sure the experience was all that positive.

Anyhow, even beyond that my life is just a torrid mess anyway. I'm really jonesing for another English class, but I'll have to wait a month--this block I have Secondary Arts & Languages, which is more or less the same class as last time. This means more visiting the same school. Hopefully I will have to talk less about Hannah Montana. No, don't ask me to explain what I'm doing.

What have I been doing with my time these days? Well, aside from fucking everything up, I've been writing a fair amount and reading even more. It must have been a wise person who said, "We write...so that we do not get more pissed off than we already are." I've been delving into a lot of fiction (okay), poetry (not so good), and essays I just sent into The Cornellian after I got a reply saying that I shouldn't complain until I have myself contributed something of value. Yes, I finally relented. I will post these all in due time, probably this evening actually.

Did anyone see Mitt Romney drop out of the race? Wonderful news, even if his concession speech was nothing but more Republican tomfoolery:

Europe is facing a demographic disaster. That is the inevitable product of weakened faith in the Creator, failed families, disrespect for the sanctity of human life and eroded morality. Some reason that culture is merely an accessory to America’s vitality; we know that it is the source of our strength. And we are not dissuaded by the snickers and knowing glances when we stand up for family values, and morality, and culture. We will always be honored to stand on principle and to stand for principle.

I think a weakened faith in the Creator is exactly what some of us could use right now. In fact, one of the articles I wrote for The Cornellian (I wrote a bunch, just in case) is about exactly that. I will post it later, even though I think I've made pretty much all of the arguments already in these pages.

You can also look forward to some writing on Philip Roth (I'm in the midst of reading all of his novels, in order of publication), the situation in Gaza, composing music for the upcoming Fuel open mic night, being a miserable individual, my roommate playing Persona 3, my fear of Hillary Clinton's inevitable nomination, and my love-hate relationship (mostly love) with L.A.M.F.

Sorry everyone. It's not like you care.

Who just can't wait to feel so frozen out

After a particularly uneasy day and an uneasy class, I managed to stumble upon High Fidelity, a movie I have always had an uneasy relationship with, while channel-surfing. I ended up watching the majority of it, rather than doing my homework.

There's one part in the movie where John Cusack's character, in particularly dire straits, sits on a bench in the pouring rain and narrates to an invisible camera. It kind of made me wish that I could do that.

Sorry this hasn't been updated lately, but that will change soon. I just need to acclimate myself to the workload. Sorry.

New Year!

I have made no secret of my almost fanatical disdain of Christmas, which is sensible given that I am Jewish and furthermore do not love horribly repetitive music. People might be shocked to learn that I am, however, a fan of New Years Day. It is not because I believe that there is any significance in some arbitrary date that may have started somewhat around when Jesus was born; rather, I like it because it encourages people to better themselves, in the form of resolutions. Every year I like to have as many resolutions as possible. Some of them don't work as well as others, but at least I write them down. Here are some of my more G-rated resolutions for this year:

1. As always, don't lie to anyone about anything, ever, in any situation. I have this resolution every year, yet somehow I always manage to break it in one way or another. I can improve that probably.

2. Work out more. I need to get rid of this paunch.

3. Try to keep in better contact with friends that aren't around me. Along those same lines, try to hang out more with everyone. It's something I probably don't do enough. This poses a problem, as my next few classes will probably be very hectic.

4. Learn the entire works of Scott Joplin/Fryderyk Chopin on the piano. So I can just sit down and play something whenever I feel like it.

5. As always, keep an open and practical mind. Refuse to judge people on any specific ideas or tastes they may have. After a while this becomes hard.

6. Read as much as humanly possible, including the entire repertoire of at least 4 authors.

7. Try to keep as detailed a dream log as I can. This will probably prove to be the most difficult.

8. Regularly update this blog, at the very least once a day. Has to be a substantial blog post as well, not like this one.

9. Learn more about the following subjects, which I know very little about: sports, cars, economics, food.

10. Shave on a regular basis (very important).

Anyhow, I think 2008 will prove to be a very good year, provided that we aren't all nuked to death after President Huckabee declares Religious War II: Judgment Day. Iron Man is coming out in May. Lil' Wayne has a new album coming out at some point. Hopefully nothing by M. Night Shyamalan will be released. Most importantly, I think I will be a better and happier person, because I'm going to try a lot harder to be that way. Plus, I have all the love and support of my friends at Cornell, which matters to me a great deal. They can do no wrong in my book. Well, one of them can, but I'm not going to say who.

Give a gift that keeps on taking

I've been talking about politics too much lately. It's Iowa, I can't really help it. A short digression is in order, however.

For Chanukah this year, my uncle in New Jersey gave me a generous $75.00 gift certificate for this website called Kiva. You may have heard of it. It's been getting a lot of press lately, not the least from Bill Clinton giving it a glowing review on Fox News. Basically, it is a non-profit organization that finds flourishing businesspeople and entrepreneurs in third-world countries and puts them on this web site, and people can donate money through the internet to help get their business off the ground. Supposedly, after their business is getting going, your money is then reimbursed, and you can choose to either withdraw it or lend it to another business. Conceivably, you could help multiple businesses get going using a very small amount of money.

I've been having a hard time donating anything in the past few days, mainly because of all the press it's been getting. Every time I look for a new business it usually says something like, "Thanks Kiva lenders, together we have funded every single possible business on this site." So I have money to burn and no one wants it. Basically, it's becoming like eBay, where I have to religiously monitor the site until an opening comes up. I don't think most philanthropists have that problem ever.

Yes, Kiva is kind of a way for lazy white people to feel slightly better about themselves, but I think overall the cause is pretty righteous. I would recommend it to any of you that have any disposable income that you'd like to share, which I'll admit is fairly rare among college students. Look at it this way though: if you need some money, you can always just withdraw it at some point if you really want to. I can't really think of anything bad about this organization, unless one wants to argue that it is pushing "capitalist western values" upon the unsuspecting third-world populace, which I don't think really applies in this case.

In case you were wondering (and divulging this information absolutely runs counter to Jewish law), I donated money to Shamim Hameed's group in Pakistan, reasoning that Pakistan needs all the help it can get right now. Some day, you will know me as the man that singlehandedly saved Pakistan.

In case anyone cared...an introduction

Giving people information about myself over the internet isn't really a good idea, but I think it is my duty as a new blogger to at least give some context to any blog-viewer who happens upon this blog (blog blog blog). So, my name is Nathan Sacks, I'm 21, and I'm originally from Ames, IA. I go to Cornell College in Mt. Vernon, IA, famed for its use of the block plan (I'm not going to explain it: look it up.) I'm a junior and an English major.

I'm starting this because I seem to be at a creative high point right now, and while I am writing prolifically in many genres, I don't really have any method of publishing my work. Yes, I am so desperate that I would start a blog to get these ideas across, which probably means that they aren't that good to be actually published. No matter. This is probably more for me than it is for anyone else. For a while, I had a livejournal account, and it's actually still there, but it's time for me to move past the insipid high school Nathan and write about some real things. Not that I won't whine a lot. Basically, this is an attempt to get all my essays, poetry, prose, musings, longings, doodles, and drug-induced rants into one place. As such, it may seem schizophrenic--I can honestly tell you I am not actually schizophrenic.

Here are some things I am interested in:

Literature: Of course. I'm an English major. My personal tastes tend to lean more towards 20th century modernists and post-modernists, subcultural stuff ( from beats, losts, stream-of consciousness, etc.), and post-colonial literature, as well as a fair amount of creative non-fiction. Of course I'm a fan of Kerouac, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, James Joyce, Nabokov, Ishiguro, Pynchon, Philip Roth, as all college students should be. Personally, I am of the Harold Bloom school of analyzing works by their aesthetic qualities alone rather than through the lens of feminism or Marxism or what-have-you, although I've done plenty of feminist readings of books in the past and I definitely see the value in it, and I am very actively opposed to any set idea of a "canon," and I firmly believe that great literature is possible without being intimately familiar with Shakespeare or whoever.

Film: I spent a considerable amount of my days in high school educating myself with the great films of the past, by Welles, Eisenstein, Flaherty, Hawks, the usual. My current favorite directors include Todd Haynes, Richard Linklater, Jim Jarmusch, Wong Kar-Wai, Abbas Kiarostomi, and quite a few more that I don't feel like listing. I regard myself as a reformed auteurist. I spend a lot of my time reading film criticism. I don't believe that popular studio-based films are intrinsically less valuable than their independent or foreign counterparts, and I don't believe in guilty pleasures (this applies to literature and music as well): there is as much intrinsic value for me in Spider-Man 2 as there is in Diary of a Country Priest or whatever, and I have no trouble saying it. For that very reason, I am often critical of critics and award-givers alike who try to distinguish what is good "art" and what is good "entertainment" and try to determine which is more valuable.

Music: I can't claim to know more than a little about classical music, but I have an endless repository of knowledge about rock music. My last.fm account can be accessed here so you can get a better idea of what music I am generally into. I took piano lessons from when I was 5 to when I was 16, and I started playing guitar at the age of 15, which became my primary instrument from then on (I have also dabbled in bass, drums, mandolin, and a few other things). In high school, I was in a punk band called Espada Rosada that had a reasonable following amongst the Iowa State crowd (although not really at Ames High School...interesting). I would wager that music is the thing I spend the most time writing and thinking about, especially regarding the politics of popular music.

Politics: I don't want to simplify my views too much, but I would say that overall I am extremely to the left on social issues and slightly (slightly) hawkish on issues of national security, so in other words basically a New Republic democrat, except I'm not fanatically pro-Israel. My interests definitely skew American, and I have been following the 2008 presidential race religiously, despite having not chosen a candidate to support. Right now I'm leaning Kucinich. As an Iowan, I have an opportunity to be part of the Iowa Caucus, so I'll be sure to tell you guys about that.

Religion: Despite being raised in a reform (later conservative) Jewish household, I have never felt even a pang of belief in any sort of higher power, even when I was a young child. I consider myself to be an atheist even as I believe a label like that is unnecessary for people who think faith is a bullshit virtue (I tend to go along with A.C. Grayling, who thinks that non-believers should refer to themselves as "naturalists" who prefer scientific evidence of our surroundings). I am, nevertheless, very interested in the subject of religion, especially in how it forms our social circumstances and creates strife where there should not be any. I am absolutely of the opinion that the world would be significantly better without religion, and a significant portion of this blog will be spent debunking people who believe that people "need" the Bible, despite its faults, as a useful moral code. How can anyone actually believe that?

Girls: Something that I will rarely, if ever, discuss in this blog.

Academia: Something that is very interesting to me, of course, as a college student. The politics of Cornell College are extremely interesting, although I'm not sure how much I will be able to divulge and still have friends at the end of the day.

Psychological disorders: Something else I'm a bit uncertain about...certainly honest exploration of emotion is a given on any blog, but I don't want this to turn into a livejournal. In any case, I have a history of depression that I might want to explore at some point.

Of course that won't be all of what this blog is about, but it's a good start. Expect a lot of half-written, perhaps even badly written stuff. This isn't going to be a particularly outstanding blog, I can tell you. But it is mine.

I know my E-Mail seems to be smedley.smorganoff@gmail.com, but that's because this confounded blogger.com makes you get a gmail account. I would prefer it if you direct all questions and comments to N-Sacks@cornellcollege.edu. Please no bullshit about how I am a heathen, please.