Objects In My Possession, Whose Presence In My Life Could, Perhaps, Help To Explain My Current State-of-Mind

- A bookmark with the words “Say No to free speech” printing on one side, demarcating page 122 in a copy of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King.

- A large framed print, by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, depicting a lone bird in an overcast sky, hanging on my bedroom wall.

- A rock, picked up in the Plaza de Armas, Cusco, Peru, by Julia Pelsinski on a night we went dancing, which she carried in her purse for over a month and gave to me the night before I left Peru.

- A large mess, on the floor of my bedroom in the basement of my parent’s house the result of: 1) my attempts to organize, which inevitably involves the room falling into a bigger mess than before on account of everything being pulled out for sorting (most things being thrown/given away), 2) my luggage basically exploding when I “unpacked” after returning home, 3) my inability to put my “unpacked” things away due to the current organizing process (which, admittedly, is not my favorite thing to do, and so takes a very long time, because it’s easy to get distracted by reruns of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” when you are doing something you dislike).