And so another Friday passes. I find myself choosing a self-imposed quarantine against the night at only 12:15, exhausted and rather convinced that anywhere it went from here, tonight could only get more disillusioning.

I look at this campus with an odd and critical eye, thinking at once "Perhaps I should suck this all in, truly scrape up every moment I can. Because lord knows, I'm never coming back," and "Well, I'll be back in a year, and this semester is like slogging through something slightly more viscous than pudding cut with butter. Let's try and look forward to that ideal of summer." Everything is at once a reason to leave and one to stay. The friends, you know you'd probably never really connect to. Transient midwestern experience, and all. And, ultimately, like them as you may, they're not worth 30,000 a semester. But on the other hand, the hard work, the high fees, the asthma attacks brought on by fits of film-series related marathons--perhaps these all toughen you up.

At any rate, today I got a chance to go to Chicago to visit the Art Institute. I'd never been there before, and who knows when the great magnetic forces of the grids of our maps will hound me back here once more, to this strangely desolate and flat land which is the midwest. Chicago always impresses me in a strange way which almost easily slips into boredom. There's too much of it, too spread out. Other cities have sprawl, yes. But a lot of other cities also have topographic features that keep them in. Chicago has a lake to one side, and to the other three, nothing. But in there, there is beauty, and culture, and all those things I miss when I'm here in a small town, smaller even than that from whence I came.

The Art Institute is a great museum. Like the MFA, it stretched on seemingly forever--though I had four or five hours to be there, I had to miss several exhibits, skim others. Unlike the MFA, there seemed to be a method in how and where things were kept--no Jasper Johns by the elevators, no Warhol oxidations beside paintings from the 20s.

And now I suddenly cut this off from disinterest. I find sustained writing more and more difficult these days. Fifteen pages on Jack T Chick are due on the 13th, and I cannot see them getting done. Five pages on the Lotus Sutra due Monday. That's going to be the first hurdle. I can really see the fifteen on Chick being done in two or three days. Three perhaps would be best--it's only a rough draft, and I tend to average (given sustained interest with few distractions) five pages of decent prose in two or three hours.

But given my current state of ADD, we'll see how I do with that.