I'm going to try to be a little less a.r. about what I post here. I.e. try to be a little more open, or random, or free-wheeling or whatever.

Right now there are only like 11 days until I leave Budapest, and I'm really getting to hate the city. Call me a crybaby or whatever but this is how I feel: each morning is just another day I have to get up and go outside and contend with an environment that I don't understand. I feel completely alien in this place. I am not a citydweller. I have no interesting experiences to tell...i am reclusive, I live a life of the mind, which some would say is no life at all. But I will argue against those who say so. But you can argue back and forth forever and where do you get? Each party just has its own interests in the end and will claim to be right no matter what an argument says. So much for dialogue or dialectic or whatever one wants to call it. It's hard to see how there can be any development without a leap of some sort, a leap to finality, to metaphysics or something.

I have to take two math finals yet and I don't care. The first is on Thursday--today is Monday and I have nothing to do really since I got the paper done early for my East European history class, so I should be studying...theoretically. I have emailed so many people about these ideas, so it feels really crazy to be writing them here now--like I'm just rehashing old shit that everybody knows about and I'm just burdening everybody with all the time because I don't have the balls to really stand up to this existential mess that I have got to deal with--this mess that every human being on the planet has got to deal with.

About the paper I wrote. I feel like it's just worthless. Actually it is. I didn't really do anything but just quote a few things and write a few things--boom 1700 words of notes basically, and somehow that get's me a comment from the instructor that I can consider the paper done. (I submitted a rough draft early.)

I want so desparately to write but each time I begin, I feel like I won't really get anywhere with any of it: not "real scholarship", "not serious scholarship", what the hell is that anyway? Does it mean someone sitting at a desk pouring over books and papers and such for hours and hours, perhaps weeks, and months, not knowing where he or she is going with his or her ideas until one day there is a manuscript ready to be sent to some publisher? Is that what it really is? But how does one do all of that? Each time I think about it, I'm afraid I don't have what it takes to really do something like that.

But then perhaps it doesn't matter if I don't.

Well...have I been too personal? I did call this blog "My Brain is Open" afterall.