My god there's a lot of stupid shit on the internet or, And just when you thought your day couldn't get any more pointless or, Gosh, if I were a hamster, and not an entirely different species of incomparable intellect, but I were still to maintain certain generalizable aspects of my personality, what breed of hamster would I be?
as i was strolling down kappa path, i found a rock shaped exactly like dinah's nose. i ran home to show her, as we've fallen victim to the parent-child dynamic that grows between roommates ("dinah! i got a 'C' on the realism paper! that's way higher than i would have expected, given that it was three weeks overdue!" "that's great, annie! i'm so proud of you! here, have some jewbread," and so on and so forth. don't call me an anti-Semite for the "jewbread" remark, you taught me that. although, i must admit, i do hate jewish people...) anyway, i had this rock. as i have no mind of my own, i tend to pick up the behaviors of the people around me, so i began tossing it from hand to hand and humming french opera in that dashing benpopik way. i was still moronically playing catch with myself when my eyes fell on a lamppost, which was just sitting there, looking all smug and inanimate. "lousy lamppost! i'll fix you good-!" i hurled the rock, missing the lamppost, but striking the small child who happened to be sitting directly behind it. no. but i would like this anecdote more if that had happened.
11.25.2002 My twenty-first birthday was on Friday.
I waltzed into a liquor store the week before, and tried to waltz out with a case of Corona. "Hey, could I see some ID?" Like most college students, I've been buying alcohol for years. I bought my first fake ID when I was seventeen years old and had hardly begun to grow facial hair. The fact that I was capable of successfully purchasing alcohol at such a young age makes it all the more insulting when I get carded now. And even though, up until Friday, it was still illegal for me to buy any amount of beer, let alone two cases, I was still greatly offended. Mostly because I buy beer there all the time. "ID?" Repeating the letters back at him made obvious my contempt. "Yeah, sure, hold on." In a moment of humor, and having forgotten my fake, I handed him my real ID. He studied it for a few seconds before looking up. "This says you're twenty." He looked genuinely confused. "I am twenty. But come on, my birthday is on Friday." "Well, Happy Birthday." "Thanks," I said, reaching out my hand with the money in it. "I...don't think I can take that." "Come on, please? I'll be twenty-one in less than a week. Nothing about me is going to change between now and Friday." I thought I had him with that argument. I would have had me with that argument. "Naw, it's not that, it's a legal thing." We both paused. Neither of us were budging. But he didn't look confident of his own stance. He had a look that told me that there was a lie that would push him over to my side, and that I just hadn't found it yet. We both stood there staring at each other waiting for me to discover it. "Please? It's for my birthday party." I'd found it, and his face broke into a smile. He laughed to himself while he bagged the cases.
I've been buying the beer for four square for almost two years now, and four square consumes a lot of beer. There were nights last year, Wednesday nights, no less, that I would buy enough beer to necessitate several trips from the refrigerator to the counter, and then several trips from the counter to the car. Of course, in terms of identity, I wasn't the one buying the beer. In fact, "Benjamin Popik" wasn't present at all. Rather, on those nights, my older, and seemingly alcoholic counterpart, Michael Darwin, stood in for me. I'm not going to explain the comical origins of my foolish pseudonym, but will rather provide the same explanation that I give to anyone who asks about my screen name (Guitar15m) or my license plate (HENDRX): I'm a completely different person than I was five years ago, but younger-me left lasting traces of himself everywhere. Every since I began buying beer, I've been waiting for the day that I turned twenty-one. Not because I was excited about the prospect of being able to drink legally, but because I've always felt like that day could potentially be very funny. I've dreamt over and over of walking into the gas station I frequent and waving a greeting to the women who work there, women I have come to know well. "Doris! Helen! How are you?" Then I would pick up two cases of beer, one in each hand, and let them both smack down with all their weight on the wooden counter. Helen would ask for my ID, like she did every time, and Doris would stand behind her on her right, next to the cash register. I would open my wallet and reach past my fake ID, pulling out my genuine driver's license and handing it over to Helen. She would squint at the small print, and glance back and forth from the card to my face. She would read the date of my birthday over and over in her mind. "But, Michael, this isn't you at all," she would say. "This says your name is Benjamin, and it says you turn twenty-one...today." "That's right, Helen," I would exclaim, taking the cases in my hands, "you just think about that." For some reason, in my mind, this situation would have been some sort of victory. The ill-tempered clerks would realize how many times they'd been fooled, and the public realization of that fact would have meant their defeat. What I realized though, and only days before my birthday, was that these women, who had come to symbolize restriction and discrimination, weren't my enemies at all. They had illegally sold me alcohol for years, and the public realization of that fact would have meant them losing their jobs.
The other night, I ate dinner with Jamaica Kincaid. I like saying things like that because they make me sound important. In college, like in elementary school, who you eat with is partly indicative of who you are. So accordingly, if you chew your corrugated pizza across the table from famous author Jamaica Kincaid, you're obviously a very important person. Like, for instance, me. And while this all sounds like some sort of elaborate lie, the likes of which I would have told on a less-honest occasion, Jesus himself has never been so honest.
Because I can hardly breathe without help from the internet, one of the first things I do in the morning is check my e-mail. The morning before last, I was wading through my inbox, deleting all of the crap that Bard sends me, when I noticed my name--my full name--in one of the letters.
Dear Benjamin - Would you like to have dinner with Jamaica Kincaid? RSVP by calling my office. Blah blah blah. - The Dean
With the letter still open, I picked up the phone. I dialed the numbers once and then hung up the phone. I thought about it. I picked up the phone and dialed them again. I was really suspicious, and with good reason: A. I've been set up before in similar situations. B. I'm currently in an e-mail-based war with sneaky Adam Conover, who would just love for me call the Dean's office and make a fool of myself. C. Why would anyone ask me if I wanted to eat with a novelist?
"Oh, Ben, John Updike is swinging by Bard on Tuesday, we were wondering if maybe you wanted to play tennis with him." "Tuesday? Oh, Tuesday's no good for me. Tuesday I'm brunching with Hemingway's ghost. Could he reschedule for Wednesday?"
The phone rang. I never doubted, even for a second, even if the letter was some sort of well-planned prank, that the number I was calling was in fact that of the Dean. There was a high potential for embarrassment. "Dean's office." "Hi. My name is Benjamin Popik, I received a letter regarding Jamaica Kincaid coming to Bard." "Okay." The girl on the other end of the phone had no idea what I was talking about. But because she was a student, she didn't have to know anything. I was hoping for someone to respond with something like, "Oh, well, I'm glad to hear you can make it to the dinner, which is very real, and in no way a cruel joke being played on you by your friends." Instead, I would have to milk what information I could out of work-study Susan. "Do you know if she'll still be here tonight?" "I really don't know anything about it. If that's what it said in the email." I wanted to tell her, "But see, the thing is, one of my friends might have written that e-mail," but I didn't feel like explaining any more ridiculousness over the phone. "The letter said to call you to RSVP, and, well, I would like to join her for dinner." I said the finally phrased confidently, and in a meter, understanding full-well that I could not be humiliated by someone who knew so little. Said with foolish confidence, the words came out, "I/would like/to join her/for dinner." The whole conversation seemed like nonsense by that point. "All right," she said, "I'll make a note of it." I imagined that note. You don't remember a name like "Popik" for the full length of a conversation. It's the sort of name you need to ask about a second time, which she hadn't done, and it seemed unlikely that she'd written it down at the opening of our conversation, before I'd asked anything of her. It seemed more likely that she'd scrawled-down "CRAZY," and underlined it twice.
For sport, because I hadn't yet been humiliated, and because it was more interesting than the alternative, I went through the rest of my day assuming that I would, in fact, be eating dinner with Jamaica. It changed the way I looked at my daily routine. I scoffed at people in my lit class. I casually strolled in and out of the Joyce Carol Oates lecture. I looked across the lunch table with disdain at my unpublished-and-less-than-famous "friends," overcome with feelings of disgust.
I thought about what we would talk about. Much of her writing is based on her hatred of her mother, so I fine-tuned different phrases that would concisely express the potential she and I had for friendship:
"You know who I had a fight with the other day? My mother. Can anyone else here relate to that?" or,
"Whoa mama! This is one mother of a sandwich!"
I would drop her deep-seeded psychological issues like I had dropped her name that entire day.
I showed up early to the faculty dining area. I waited. I sat there eating by myself, and what's more, I couldn't find the light switch, so I ate there eating by myself in the dark. When six o'clock rolled around, she didn't show. Neither did any of the other students who presumably would have received similarly unexpected letters were this dinner indeed a reality. My soup tasted like humiliation. Soups at Bard always taste like humiliation, it's something about the combination of seasonings they use in making them, but that night my soup was especially strong. I finished my dinner. But as I was getting up to leave, a couple other students waltzed in, flipping the switch on the wall and revealing me and my dirty silverware, seated alone in the empty faculty dining hall. At moments like that, I step outside of myself, and I stand way back to watch what unfolds.
"Hi...Ben" Awkward pause. "Were you eating in the dark?" "Oh, yeah, that. I've had a terrible headache all afternoon, it was more comfortable that way." Swish! You know you've told a decent lie when they offer to turn the lights back off.
"Every morning I lay on the floor in the front parlour watching her door. The blind was pulled down to within an inch of the sash so that I could not be seen. When she came out on the doorstep my heart leaped. I ran to the hall, seized my books and followed her. I kept her brown figure always in my eye and, when we came neat the point at which our ways diverged, I quickened my pace and passed her. This happened morning after morning. I had never spoken to her, except for a few casual words, and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood."
Today I twice passed a deer sleeping on the side of the road. I could tell he was sleeping by how peaceful he looked. Not a fly or a speck of blood, and every bone was where it should have been. "That's adorable," I thought to myself quietly, for fear of waking him.
(Didn't make sense to you? Then you've never seen this.)
I'm sorry I haven't posted at all lately, but I've been remarkably busy. I started a sketch comedy and improv group at Bard called Olde English, and we've been slaving away lately to put together a big, crazy, multigenre show for December 14th. It's all a lot of fun and the sketches are coming out beautifully, but that's been consuming all of my time lately.
Anyway, the above video is one of our Apple ad parodies. I am not the actor in the video, but if you come to the show, I'm in at least one of the other Apple ads we'll show. I'd post mine here if it weren't so alarming.
11.13.2002
When Dmitri Mendeleev designed and published the Periodic Table in 1869, only sixty-three of the one-hundred-and-eighteen elements were known. Later, in 1879, Lars Fredrick Nilson discovered scandium. In 1886, Clemens Winkler discovered Germanium. Most of the remaining elements have since been identified, and until recently, only three had gone undiscovered.
The discovery of the one-hundred and sixteenth element took the scientific community by storm. First of all, the discovery was not made by a nuclear physicist, as past discoveries have been, but by the Veryfine Beverage Corporation. The second surprise was the nature of the element. Much to the shock and disbelief of chemists around the world, the one-hundred and sixteenth element was, well, fruit.
"It had been under our noses this entire time, I can't believe we didn't make this discovery earlier," remarked one MIT physicist.
Even more shocking are the element's properties. Despite fruit's location on the periodic table, amidst highly volatile and fleeting elements whose existence has only been observed in a laboratory setting for fractions of a second, fruit appears not only to be extremely stable, but also sensuously delicious. Fruit does not react similarly to its neighboring elements, but rather mirrors the reactivity of hydrogen.
Marking its reactive similarity to hydrogen, Veryfine quickly marked the marketing capabilities of their discovery, and through a distillation process, paired the element with oxygen to synthesize a zero-calorie juice drink.
"In my opinion, it seems to early to be exploiting and marketing an elements whose properties have hardly been explored," commented Harvard chemist Michael Branford.
"I don't know if it's safe or not--I don't know, I haven't tested it. But I'll tell you this much: you won't see my kids drinking it."
11.11.2002
Last night I wrote the President of my college a relatively formal letter, respectfully requesting ten minutes of his time and the permission to film his response to a simple question for a comedy sketch. Ten minutes did not seem like too much to ask--I probably spent ten minutes writing him the letter, choosing my words carefully and pretending to be a serious person. And then I sent the letter. And then I waited.
A friend and I stopped by the President's office last Friday to request a moment of his time. His two secretaries, who make his appointments and read his mail, instructed us, before we could meet with him, to first write the President a letter regarding the nature of our needing to meet with him, and the specific questions to be asked. So I did that. But still, I did not receive a response. So today I called his office.
"The President's office." "Hi, my name is Ben Popik, I wrote the President an e-mail regarding the possibility of meeting with him today..." "Today?" "Yeah." "An e-mail?" "Yeah." "Okay, what did the e-mail say?" "Well, I represent Bard's improv and sketch comedy group, and we were interested in filming his response to a specific question. Maybe--" "What was the question?" "Well, I stopped by the President's office on Friday, and the woman working there told me that if I sent him a letter with the question, we would might have a chance to meet with him today." "I understand that, but what was the question? I need to find your letter before I can show it to him." "It's from Ben Popik. Bp625. Maybe it's in his inbox." "Could you just tell me what the question was?" "Okay." I paused. "I wanted to ask him how much money it would take for him to kill a puppy with his bare hands." "Oh god..." "It's for a comedy performance, we--" "I deleted that e-mail this morning, I thought it was some sort of violent joke." "Well, what we wanted to do was contrast the President's response with those of students offering to do the job for free. And--" "But what kind of person would ask a question like that?" "It's for a comedy show, we--" "I just can't believe you'd ask people that. That seems sick." "Well, you'd be surprised at how little some people would do it for." "I don't want to talk about this. Just resend the letter and I'll give it to him." "Thank you very mu--" Click.
I do not fully understand the project and I am not sure that I would want to cooperate. My answer is, "under no circumstances and at no price." I have no more to say about it.
11.9.2002 Listening carefully in a cafe, I overheard two morons being completely serious with one-another.
"Wow, man, that's so much debt. How are you going to pay that off? Are you gonna get a job?" "Naw, actually, I think I've got it figured out." "What are you going to do?" "I'm pretty sure I have some money headed my way." "From where?" "All right, lemme try to explain this. See, Bill Gates is one of the richest men in the world, he's the head of Microsoft, ya know, and he's giving away his money. He wants his company's Internet Explorer to be the most popular browser on the internet, so he's giving people like two-hundred dollars every time they forward this e-mail." "What?! That's crazy!" "I know! Right? But here's the thing--" "What? What?" "I sent the letter to like twenty people! So I figure that's like four-thousand dollars coming my way right there." "Wow. Why don't I get e-mails like that?" "Why, do you know a lot of e-mail addresses?" "Totally!" "All right, cool! I'll send it to you!"
At which point they got up, and walked to the computers.
11.8.2002 I got another job today! Sigh. I love becoming employed.
UPDATE: Nope, nevermind, I've been "let go." For the second time in the past year, I've lost my job before I ever had a chance to perform it. Sigh. I was really looking forward to this one, too.
11.7.2002 I found this in my mailbox two days ago, and that moment was decidely the high-point of my week. I peeked in the tiny window and did my "Ooh! I've got mail!" dance, not yet realizing that the supposed letter was in fact fallen foliage. I must have looked peculiar, standing there in the post office, palming an enormous leaf and giggling. (I don't giggle often, but when I do, it's quite enjoyable.) I really wish I had a picture of myself at that moment. I really wish I had a picture of the moment when the post office women found an addressed leaf in the outgoing campus mail bin.
11.5.2002 I made a joke in class today that I shouldn't have made. The course was English Literature, and we were half an hour into a discussion of poetry and other such nonsense when our professor removed the sixty-two pound anthology from her bag, and asked everyone to choose which Yeats poems should be focused-on in the next class. There were maybe thirty-five different full-length poems to choose from, spanning forty-eight densely-packed pages.
"The Rose of the World!" one girl called out. The teacher marked it down. Another girl: "Ooh, and also 'Leda and the Swan.'" "Good suggestion!" the teacher added. "But if we're going to read that swan poem, we also have to read 'The Wild Swans at Coole.'" A third girl: "What about 'Down by the Salley Gardens'?" The teacher was putting a mark next to each of these poems in her book, and my classmates just kept shouting out titles. I imagined myself bent over a book, late at night and crying, while William Butler Yeats sat on my bed laughing, the whole time slapping his ancient knees, each rotted to the bone. "While were at it, why don't we just read all of them?" I interrupted. I was, of course, kidding, and a couple people laughed. But my English professor looked at me quite seriously. "All right, that's a good idea," she said in all seriousness. "Why don't we just read all of them, and then we'll decide collectively in class which ones to discuss." There was a moment of silence while we all looked at each other. The girl across the table from me wore a face that made obvious her intention to hurt me terribly. "After class, your ass is grass," the girl next to me whispered poetically. I looked again across the table, where another girl was burning a hole in my face with her eyes. "I'm serious, Ben. There's gonna be a beat-down after class." I contemplated worriedly whether or not she was actually serious, and, assuming that she was, whether or not I deserved the right to defend myself.
I wish I had cameras for eyes. When the girl across the cafe from me is thinking, she puts things in her mouth. Her fingers. Her pencil. Her scarf. A minute ago it was the sharp point of a leaf so fantastically large that her face was completely hidden behind it. And then it was the tips of her fingers again. And now it's the corner of the page she just finished reading. If I wasn't afraid of letting her know how much I've been watching her, I would leap out of my seat and rescue the salt shaker.
1. I'm writing this from the room of one of my closest high school friends. She's gone now, on a boat somewhere, but her things are all around me. They smell like her, but none of them are familiar. She has her own life now, full of plastic things that clutter her small space. These things are all very real, it's clear to me, sitting here, that Aly is alive and living. I know this probably seems like an infant's perception of reality, but when I lose contact with someone, it's almost as though they cease to exist. But again, sitting here, eyeing objects that are represent memories of events I wasn't a part of, it's clear that Aly has not ceased to exist. It's refreshing. The details of her room don't make sense to me, and they make everything seem bigger.
2. I followed a current of people into the room of a girl I had briefly met and whose name I had twice learned and still did not remember. I was the last to enter the room, and closing the door behind me, I found a post-it note taped above the door handle with the message: "You're not as busy as you think you are. Don't be stupid." It was the most brilliant thing I had ever seen, and I immediately scanned the details of the rest of her room to decide whether or not I was in love with this girl. It turned out that I wasn't (she listened to 80's metal), but I was still impressed by the note on the door. I panned my eyes around the room looking to discover what other amazing things she'd invented. I took out my long "to do" list and added "stop taking your life seriously."
3. Sitting on a steep stairway in some other peoples' place, a girl gone on ecstacy told me that we don't tell people how we feel enough. She told me, looking at my face and chewing on her fingers, that she wanted to tell everyone that had it coming that she loved them. She was right, completely right, but right then, I was just afraid that she was going to tell me that she loved me. I wasn't on ecstacy, and I didn't know how I would respond. We sat in a comfortable silence for a long moment while she chewed the backs of her thumbs and I read the small print of the posters on the walls. I thought about the people I loved, and how I didn't seem them enough.
I remembered a night I spent on mushrooms, in the woods with Adam and Jon, when I decided to call the five people I really love out of their complicated lives. I thought that collectively, we could be living better than we were. The lives we were living were not entirely our own, and right then I wanted to change that. We could find an abandoned farm and live on it. We could leave behind all the things that were weighing us down. I went home and left messages on Lauren's machine. I looked everywhere for Ned's phone number in Canada. I feel asleep wishing I didn't feel so alone. But that was a long time ago, before I found a girl to sit and talk with me on a steep Massachusetts staircase. She didn't love me though, we were two people talking on stairs.
The rain set early in tonight, The sullen wind was soon awake, It tore the elm-tops down for spite, And did its worst to vex the lake: I listened with heart fit to break. When glided in Porphyria; straight She shut the cold out and the storm, And kneeled and made the cheerless grate Blaze up, and all the cottage warm; Which done, she rose, and from her form Withdrew the dripping cloak and shawl, And laid her soiled gloves by, untied Her hat and let the damp hair fall, And, last, she sat down hy my side And called me. When no voice replied, She put my arm about her waist, And made her smooth white shoulder bare, And all her yellow hair displaced, And, stooping, made my cheek lie there, And spread, o'er all, her yellow hair, Murmuring how she loved me -- she Too weak, for all her heart's endeavor, To set its struggling passion free From pride, and vainer ties dissever, And give herself to me forever. But passion sometimes would prevail, Nor could tonight's gay feast restrain A sudden thought of one so pale For love of her, and all in vain: So, she was come through wind and rain. Be sure I looked up at her eyes Happy and proud; at last l knew Porphyria worshiped me: surprise Made my heart swell, and still it grew While l debated what to do. That moment she was mine, mine, fair, Perfectly pure and good: I found A thing to do, and all her hair In one long yellow string l wound Three times her little throat around, And strangled her. No pain felt she; l am quite sure she felt no pain. As a shut bud that holds a bee, l warily oped her lids: again Laughed the blue eyes without a stain. And l untightened next the tress About her neck; her cheek once more Blushed bright beneath my burning kiss: l propped her head up as before, Only, this time my shoulder bore Her head, which droops upon it still: The smiling rosy little head, So glad it has its utmost will, That all it scorned at once is fled, And l, its love, am gained instead! Porphyria's love: she guessed not how Her darling one wish would be heard. And thus we sit together now, And all night long we have not stirred, And yet God has not said a word!
I've been repeating things lately:
"It had been under our noses this entire time, I can't believe we didn't make this discovery earlier," remarked one MIT physicist.
Marking its reactive similarity to hydrogen, Veryfine quickly marked the marketing capabilities of their discovery, and through a distillation process, paired the element with oxygen to synthesize a 
