varying degrees of light

A lot of foreigner jerks take their table at a cafe for hours and hours to watch people and sip their much-too-expensive coffee (who do they think is impressed?) and--this is the good part--occasionally scribble something in a notebook with a thoughtful look molded on their faces. Even if I confidently spit out a few Korean phrases in a timbre that has been described "like a voice actor's" every once in a while, make no mistake: I am one of those foreigner jerks. And the coffee usually really is very expensive.

There are no binding rules in the journal(s). A dry exchange with interesting rhythm, a description of something or someone intriguing, or--most often--a prompt that may or may not be expanded and explore further if revisited.

And then you read something on the internet and wonder how to proceed because this jerk basically already did it, and did it better than you would have. The persistence and anger is equivalent to hating the new Christopher Nolan movie because you basically had that same idea a few years ago whenever. (Hahaha.)

Dispatches from Adjunct Faculty at a Large State University. (McSweeney's)

"One reason we're funny is, we keep tryin' and tryin', meeting infrequently for just an hour at a time, to profess something of value to a diverse and often large audience, who may not have had enough interest in the subject to look into it on their own, and who, over the previous 12 to 16 years of their educational lives, may have developed an antipathy to schedules, textbooks, the English language, teachers who remind them of their plumber fathers, and the screech of chalk on slate." --Oronte Churm