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Date: February 4th, 2020.

Time of Writing: 9:47 PM.

Weather: Warmish, overcast.

Mood: Kinda lost, to be honest.

Day Overview: Did an essay swapping activity in class today where we cut up our essay paragraph by paragraph, shuffled them, and gave them to someone else and saw what order they put the pieces in. I was the only one in class where both of the people that got my essay put it in the order I wrote it in. Awesome. Amazing. I'm supposed to revise this thing? The pieces of feedback I have are absolutely contradictory. I'll make some minor edits and maybe move one paragraph, cut some words here and there, tidy it up, I don't know, it's due on Thursday. Then I went to my least favorite dining hall and got some food to go. I didn't have time to head back to my room or anything like that, because I have a class too soon after my morning writing section to justify heading back. Watched a documentary and answered some questions for my online class in the meantime. Think what I'm going to do is wait until the weekend when I have time to catch up on lectures. The weekend being Friday, because that's when my weekend starts now.

The new class is dreadfully boring. I sat in the back. It was a lecture, and it was without any sort of variety. I had honestly more fun watching the first of the online lectures for the other class. I get that learning isn't supposed to be fun, but this was sort of like being dragged along the ground for an hour and a half. At least it's going to be an easy class. The girl I talked to in the partner discussion was nice. I probably should have asked her name but we just retreated into our phones once we said what we were required to say to each other. I'm like three degrees from being a boomer phone bad! piece of shit, I can tell. Then I went to Film Studies, which, like usual, was good. Anime Club came after that, and for once my team won trivia, which was weird because the topic was Sports Anime and I know absolutely zero of those. Ari called me in the middle, so I had to step out of the room and talk to him for a bit. It was nice to hear from him. I left early anyway - again, no interest in sports anime - and got dinner alone, and here I am.

On My Mind: The fucking Iowa caucus. What a fucking farce. The whole Pete Buttigieg/Shadow Inc thing that's been unfolding has made me incredibly mad. Why did I think electoralism would ever work? And they're reporting 62 percent of precincts like it's 100 percent, and the areas that have the least reporting are the places where Bernie is the strongest, and you can tell that they are doing everything in their power to keep from having to tell the country that Bernie won Iowa, or at least try to soften the impact of the news when it hits. What a fucking joke. The DNC is hopeless. I'm not even sure that I'd vote for someone other than Bernie in the election, because all these democrat candidates have shown themselves to be rats and snakes, through and through.

• No Logo based on the book by Naomi Klein: The whole documentary is basically an interview with Naomi Klein, but it's edited in a really engaging way. I feel like it isn't very persuasive, and based on what I've read of her writing from the book I don't think that it's anywhere near a good replacement. Still a good watch, in the sense that something soul-crushing and despair inducing can be considered to be good for a person. 7/10.
• Citizen Kane directed by Orson Welles: Well, I finally did it. After years of putting it off, years and years of waiting for the day that this movie would, I don't fucking know, just happen to me someday, it finally did. And I have no idea how the hell I feel about it. On the one hand, the opening sequence is pretty legendary. On the other hand, the framing device of the interviews gets old pretty quick. The cinematography is ahead of its time, and yet the bag of tricks it pulls from is relatively small. The acting is convincing, and the actors flub their lines. The ending of the film is pretty legendary, and the last twenty minutes of the film are pretty bad. It has the first real jumpscare in film, and that jumpscare makes no sense and pretty much sucks. It's a mixed bag of a film, and I have no idea how I feel about it. So for now it gets a tentative 6/10. Average, because my good thoughts and bad feelings cancel out.
• Night Falls Over Kortedala by Jens Lekman: Well this is sickly sweet. Between the motown samples and Jen's bright but monotone style of singing, there's something about this album that is deeply saccharine and feels artificial. Really what drags this down is Jen's singing. It has a way of blanketing the album in this really generic color pallette, which is rough when the music behind him is so often very expressive and imaginative. I had a good time listening, though, and the lyrics are a big part of that. If they were even just a fraction less enjoyable to follow along with, then this would be rated that much lower, but as is they pretty much make the album by providing the sincerity that this sound so desperately needs in order to work properly. 7/10 overall.

Produced: Got a few hundred words out of my system today, but nothing else yet.

Other Thoughts: Thank you for reading, sorry if I've been getting a bit political lately but I can't help it. Don't forget to tune in to WMUA this week for another new episode of The Theme Machine! 12:00 AM to 2:00 AM EST Friday Morning, as per usual. This week's theme is Characters! What do I mean by that? Tune in to find out!