The Vandalized Napkin

an introspective post about 2011

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 02:30:25 -0500

Could’ve been better.

Could’ve been worse.

oh hai

Sun, 04 Dec 2011 03:39:15 -0500

i maded an update because somebody tolded me to

yes folks that’s right

the vandalized napkin is now officially a sellout

EATT MORE RADISH AND TOFU

why yes i made this at 2 in the morning, why do you ask

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 03:05:29 -0500

why yes i made this at 2 in the morning, why do you ask

this beautiful imperfect world

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 03:15:31 -0500

I wish there were ways to put into words all the strange, exhilarating, carefree, sad things you think about at 2:13 A.M., without making a fool of yourself in the morning.

An excerpt of something I wrote about a year ago when it was most definitely not sunny and I was most definitely not fully awake, alert, and conscious

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 00:11:00 -0400

There’s something I find extraordinarily calming about a blue sky replete with clouds: starched white ribbons, fluffed cotton balls playing charades, sometimes a foggy sheen fizzing over the golden dawn like foam on the surface of beer. Or a clear sky; those are great too. There’s something about the presence of this ball of lit orange gas that by happenstance sits just so far away from your lonely rock in the vastness of space, standing witness to its aura: the realization that life, your life, everyone’s life, all this existence wrapped in love and hate and joy and misery is the chemical byproduct of a bunch of flaming atoms playing pinball in the core of a star just so many millions of miles away.

So I was eating a banana while thinking about bacon and the banana tasted like bacon. Crazy world.

Sun, 09 Oct 2011 19:40:01 -0400

(When I say I try to keep my Tumblr marginally more intelligent than my Facebook, this is what I mean.)

A post, for once.

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 22:55:00 -0400

Because, let’s face it, like so many other things on the internet, Tumblr is what you turn to when it’s late on a school day and you’ve exhausted all other rational options.

(Translation: I might actually post things now.)

(But not right now.)

Yes, I know crossposting things from Facebook is a particularly...

Sun, 26 Jun 2011 00:41:12 -0400

Yes, I know crossposting things from Facebook is a particularly poetic example of hypocrisy for someone who likes to get on a soapbox regarding so-called “lazy” Tumblrs, but a picture is worth a thousand words, and I figure my Facebook wall can spare 500 of them.

Quotable Quotes: Religion

Tue, 21 Jun 2011 16:39:08 -0400

“Any religion is a higher form of superstition.”

~Donald Richie

6.21.11.02:16

Tue, 21 Jun 2011 03:28:34 -0400

Lying awake at a quarter past two on a balmy, herbal summer night, mind trapped between the suburbs of New Jersey and the stone alleys of Shangqiu, marveling at the millions upon millions of infinitesimal choices heaped on the galleys of memory that have brought me to this point in space and time, the billions of individual discrete event-nexii converging and diverging like curves stretched taut on a graph, clotheslines strung across the pages of my untouched calculus textbook, each point, each intersection a different destiny, a whole new story that for the grace of an instant manages to transcend mathematical bounds.

In this universe delineated by blue, watery notebook lines, a voice speaks: The limit does not exist.

Time resumes its flow, sensation returning to my limbs. I feel a tickling sensation behind my nose, my eyes, an itch buried somewhere in the contours of my skull; I raise a hand almost absentmindedly to my face, and find myself surprised to see my fingers coming away red.

Another life observation

Thu, 16 Jun 2011 01:34:39 -0400

It is much more difficult for a disaffected adolescent youth to turn greasy food and insomnia into self-wrought bits of philosophical pith for the outside world to savor when he/she is no longer burdened under the cowl of mandatory procrastination.

Been far too long since I did a post tagged with both "uchicago" and "fml", am I right?

Tue, 07 Jun 2011 00:46:04 -0400

Japanese final in 8 hours.

Final SOSC paper due in 16 hours.

Didn’t start either.

Challenge accepted.

oh hai here iz post

Sun, 05 Jun 2011 00:39:00 -0400

good fortune smile upon you many day happy day forever (c) tumblr fortune cookie company 2011

After-Blog Note: General consensus agrees that this is the most articulate thing I have ever posted in my life.

Old comic drawn at midnight for insomniac friend is old. Still...

Thu, 02 Jun 2011 02:14:45 -0400

Old comic drawn at midnight for insomniac friend is old. Still good for update fodder, though.

5.30.11.03:05

Mon, 30 May 2011 04:10:56 -0400

A screenshot of my screen, because I heard a picture is worth somewhere around a thousand words, if current pixel-lexical exchange rates are any indicator.

A link

Tue, 24 May 2011 02:24:00 -0400

A link:

I do not have many convictions about what I post on this scrap of cyberspace clinging to the smarmy butthole of the internet, but I will defend tenaciously the few standards I have.

One of those standards is never to reblog or otherwise put up something that can be found anywhere else; I am particularly adamant that everything you see here originated at some point from the tortured crevices of my own brain, and no one else’s; it’s a point of pride, I guess, which kind of makes me no different from all the other Dumblrites trying to make themselves stick out like poppies in the opium field that is the Internet, but you know. There is a philosophical rant to be had in this, but I lost all my argumentative brain cells writing a rough draft of a bio paper two hours before it was due.

With that said and done, I found myself completely unable to refrain myself from posting this.

In the words of poor, caricatured hipsters everywhere: ironic, man.

——

After-Blog Note: Astute readers of this blog will surely point out that I am a filthy hypocrite because I have used hyperlinks in the past to redirect my readers to things like civet coffee and Six Billion Secrets and an article about why our business school kicks Harvard in the Bocce balls. Oh, and really good cheeseburgers. Though I like to tell myself that’s different from reblogging since I actually, you know, wrote sizable things about them instead of clicking the REBLOG button like a sap. And I have not resorted to the gambit of posting cupcake montages yet. So there.

After-Blog Note #2: That awkward moment when you realize you’ve become the self-judgmental bastard you loathed so much.

#87 - first impressions, 30 minutes

Fri, 20 May 2011 01:21:00 -0400

Today, I was cajoled and enticed by a mutual friend (you should know her if you’ve just been on an archive binge through The Vandalized Napkin’s electronic guts, for whatever Godforsaken reason I can only guess at) to attend the meeting of the RSO (Registered Student Organization) called “Drinkers with a Writing Problem”.

Anyone who has ever read something by Hemingway that doesn’t involve a giant-ass fish will appreciate the title.

That deserves its own post, which I am too tired to dictate here; perhaps I will vomit up a lengthy, introspective synopsis later. For now, all you need to know that at the beginning of every meeting, there is a 30-minute window where you are free to scribble (or type) text on whatever subject you see fit. Or you can surreptitiously look up internet porn with the screens dimmed, hoping that none of the four or five hipster girls within eyeshot of your laptop looks up from graffitiing her spiral-bound notebook.

Anyway, this is the tract I scribbled during those 30 minutes. Also, 30 minutes means 30 minutes, a section of time whose boundaries are strictly cordoned off by the incessant quacking noise of a novelty iPhone timer app, so I trust you will forgive the abrupt truncation at the end.

This is mostly addressed to said mutual friend (since she composes about 15-25% of the regular readership of this collection of my internet droppings), but I suppose the rest of you can have a peek at it as well. Just to show you what I can be capable of when locked in a humming conference room for the better part of an hour.

Also, the #87 in the title? That’s another post for another time.

——-

For as long as I’ve lived, I’ve always thought of conference rooms as places where creativity and idealism go to die, and frankly, this one is no exception. The whine of an air vent flakes itself into vibrating fragments into the distance, mirroring my own expectations. I’m angry; honest to God angry, the kind of raw emotion I haven’t been able to feel in forever since I stopped believing in life and holed myself up in my dorm like reclusive hermit hikikomori #79, reducing my life to a series of resigned all-nighters and overslept mornings.

The anger is good. It makes me want to create; it makes me want to prove myself, to justify to myself, to whatever God there is (writers always question the existence of God twice a day, no excuses), to the three or four other bored people in the room the ten or fifteen minutes I spent walking across campus, sliding myself into the bowels of a building I actually haven’t been in since- months? Holy shit. I need to get out more.

One of the consequences about being overly judgmental is that you start to see everyone else as being that way, too. It’s kind of sad, actually; you come here thinking you have something you need to prove, fresh out of having wasted the better part of the day on the Internet. You silently tear others to shreds while silently obsessing because you think they’re doing the same. Which, for all you know, might be true. You don’t get to be a writer without picking up a few tics through life. Like unjustified paranoia.

I blame Bonnie for all this. I imagine her face as I blame her; impassive and freckled, tinged with maybe the slightest hint of schadenfreude. I don’t completely rule out her enjoying my misery in a distinctively German fashion on a daily basis. I guess that’s what you expect from a person who describes herself as a writer on her Tumblr, which is 95% composed of reblogged quotes and pictures meant to trigger orgasm in design students.

Anyway, I start thinking that everyone else is in on the joke too, and get madder.

This is already a better day than usual.

——-

Openness; honesty. Words I never thought I’d find myself using, not here, not in the blank white backlit space of this bounded Word document, spilling into a pack of words I may or may not be forced to blabber out later, words which will solidify into a first impression that will define me; and that’s something I hate, you know, being bounded by a cut-and-dried definition, like an entry in a dictionary, even though as a writer you quickly realize you have to put up with thousands of those unless you want to sound like an illegitimate hack of Hemingway.

In this white space, there’s nowhere to hide; this isn’t a lab report, where you can cut and paste everything you gleaned from five and twenty-seven seconds of searching through Wikipedia. You have to confront yourself; you have to scour the cracked niches of your brain pan, raking up the proverbial muck and shaping it into something that people will enjoy, a copy of Strunk and White at your belt. Writing is kidnapping words from the English languange and forcing them into positions visually appealing to a mass audience; it’s a quote I came up with earlier in the year, a couple months ago in fact when I was doing nothing on the Internet and it popped into my head like a ground-up fortune cookie fortune on the floor of a Chinese takeout, and I’m putting it here because I still like it and I think everyone else will, too. That or they’ll start backing away from me, immediately. Paranoia again.

———

I don’t love; I don’t hate, don’t cry, don’t laugh. I don’t feel blue summer breezes wafting on my shoulders, carrying the ephemeral scent of rejuvenation up to the clouds; a writer is supposed to be acquainted with these things, to be able to wield thoughts and emotions like a surgeon brandishes a scalpel under a dim light. A writer is supposed to be, you know, acquainted with the human heart. Purple prose, Joan Didion, AP English writing samples, all that.

Well, let me tell you, it’s pretty damn hard to write about these things when you’re effectively antisocial.

(I start worrying here that this is going to sound much less impressive than it looks, because let’s face it, when I have to share, I’m going to have to read all this out loud, because fuck me if you think I’m going to pass my computer around a room full of strangers, and I don’t have a good reading voice. I don’t have a good voice, PERIOD; it’s completely dried out from lack of use, which is an occupational hazard of both the writer and the antisocial human being. This would be less of a problem if I knew how to properly use periods like prim and proper 6^th graders in Language Arts, but I like commas ever since I discovered Charles Yu adorning the very bottom tier of a stately bookshelf in the Seminary Co-Op. Sue me.)

See, the problem here is that the antisocial writer doesn’t write for an audience, he writes for himself, which is the biggest cliché since writing what you know and omitting needless words, which is great and all, but it’s ALWAYS. SO. RAMBLING. BECAUSE. The. Damn. Guy. Doesn’t. Know. How. To. Write. For. An. Audience. I mean, seriously. Be antisocial and you’re essentially spinning a giant roulette wheel, hoping that your interests, your idiosyncrasies, will align with those of your readers. And if you’re antisocial in the first place, they probably won’t.

——-

I hate getting cut off in the middle.

Why I suck, #8: Celestial Bodies

Wed, 18 May 2011 19:35:06 -0400

You know it’s not a good day when you realize you need to keep one of these in your wallet.

Oatmeal

Mon, 16 May 2011 00:36:33 -0400

You thought I was done with the immaculately-drawn comics, huh?

Well, you were WRONG.

Another one of those enlightening observations about the world that makes me think there are too many paint chips flaking off my walls

Sun, 15 May 2011 22:56:41 -0400

Fish, guests, and idealism stink after three days.