You're Asian, you must be smart, right?

Apeneck Sweeney spreads his knees
Letting his arms hang down to laugh,
The zebra stripes along his jaw
Swelling to maculate giraffe.

The circles of the stormy moon
Slide westward toward the River Plate,
Death and the Raven drift above
And Sweeney guards the horn�d gate.

Gloomy Orion and the Dog
Are veiled; and hushed the shrunken seas;
The person in the Spanish cape
Tries to sit on Sweeney's knees

Slips and pulls the tablecloth
Overturns a coffee cup,
Reorganized upon the floor
She yawns and draws a stocking up;

The silent man in mocha brown
Sprawls at the window sill and gapes;
The waiter brings in oranges
Bananas figs and hothouse grapes;

The silent vertebrate in brown
Contracts and concentrates, withdraws;
Rachel née Rabinovitch
Tears at the grapes with murderous paws;

She and the lady in the cape
Are suspect, thought to be in league;
Therefore the man with heavy eyes
Declines the gambit, shows fatigue,

Leaves the room and reappears
Outside the window, leaning in,
Branches of wistaria
Circumscribe a golden grin;

The host with someone indistinct
Converses at the door apart,
The nightingales are singing near
The Convent of the Sacred Heart,

And sang within the bloody wood
When Agamemnon cried aloud,
And let their liquid siftings fall
To stain the stiff dishonored shroud.

- T.S. Eliot

I don't know why this, Sweeney Among The Nightingales, is one of my favorite poems, but it is. I want to say that it's one of the first poems to genuinely creep me out, but I guess The Raven did that as well to some extent. In any case, this poem does it even moreso and the subtlety with which it does it enhances the fear that much more. The first time I read it I had hardly a clue what was going on, and yet chills ran down my back. The sad thing is I've never read the entirety of The Wasteland, although I've read Catch 22 quite a few times, so maybe it balances out.

As a college student, and an Engineering/Philosophy major, I sometimes wonder if I don't read enough. Then again, Mark, a good friend and a Comparative Literature major, seems to feel that as a Comp lit major he doesn't actually "make" anything. He analyzes Greek and Latin literature in their native form, and writes essays discussing various things about them in great detail. I spend hours tweaking resistor and capacitor values to make my amplifier meet specs or sometimes I spend hours debugging code that describes how some finite state machine is supposed to work.

I guess what it boils down to is that there's never enough time to do everything you want. I've wanted to learn how to do a billion things but due to whatever reasons (primarily sloth), I don't feel like I excel in much of anything.

People always talk about how "there's always someone better" or "there's always a bigger fish", but for some reason that has always bothered me. If there's always someone better, isn't that necessarily a paradox? If you start going up the chain, eventually you're going to reach the top. I've been over the idea with myself many times, and I end up thinking that the idea is that even if someone is the most awesome chess player ever, there is always going to be something that he isn't good at.
Or something.

In any case, the final stretch of finals is rearing its ugly head and I must answer its call. (By the way, I still type out "it's" all the time when I mean a possessive it. Damn English)