In My Life remains the greatest song ever written. It may be the greatest that will ever be written.

Faith is rare, ephemeral, and transitory. When you find it, you have to act without delay, before you lose it, and with it, opportunity.

—

Yes… it’s time.

Went to sleep well after midnight, got up at 5.00, have been working since the moment I rolled out of bed. Now I will go to work, where I will work some more until 1.30 or so. Then I will study like mad until classes start at 4.00, in which I am tremendously behind both in theory and in practice. Those run until 8.00, after which I will pull out papers and type away madly until very late. Thursday morning I get up and go straight to school, where I continue to type away madly until submitting the next paper Thursday evening at class, which runs until 8.00. Then I go to a speaking event, after which I start reading Durkheim cover-to-cover?

Fuck that shit. The right answer is “then I go back uptown to The Abbey, have a couple nice ones, and go see a quiet film. Or maybe stay in and see a quiet film. Or maybe play around with photos all night.”

—

My lovely significant other is going to San Francisco for a few days. Dammit I wish I was going with her. I could use a dose of SF right now. I never thought I’d be wishing myself back to California, but this morning I feel like I’d absolutely love to be sitting around Fisherman’s Wharf gawking at tourists and feeding seagulls and reading Durkheim instead of thinking about spending a weekend inside the NSSR or I-House reading Durkhiem.

Funny thing about life… it never seems to really be unified, tied together. San Francisco represents a definite thread of my life that’s very far away right now. I suppose the same goes for everywhere but New York itself. Is this sensation of separation and lack of integration really as simple as “geographical distance?” Have I basically just rediscovered that yes, San Francisco is indeed far away from New York? Maybe I overcomplicate things.

I suppose there’s also temporal distance. Most of my “San Francisco life,” inasmuch as there is one (it’s always felt like there was) is also years back in the past. I haven’t been there in a real way since mid-2003, and I haven’t been there at my leisure since mid-2002. And those non-event (i.e. not wedding or funeral or whatever) family gatherings that used to happen haven’t really happened since sometime in the ’90s, I think. I don’t suppose those will really ever happen again—generations have shifted. If they are to happen, it will have to be my generation that organizes it, I suppose.

—

I’ve just opened the shade to find that it’s snowing in New York this morning.