It turns out I missed my class's final year get-together from not checking my emails enough. This feels like a weirdly appropriate coda for my time in college, as does the mixture of dread and burnout depression that accompanies the exam season. Go Class Of '11. I was bad at all of it to the extent that I still honest to god can't walk through campus without feeling an overwhelming urge to curl into a ball and weep but at least I got some reading done and I think I've learned some stuff, even if it wasn't what I was supposed to be learning. If that sounds like a pretty halfassed excuse then it's because it is!
It feels pretty obnoxious to let this stuff SEEP THROUGH CAREFULLY MAINTAINED E-PERSONA apropos of nothing yes so here's a neat video!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=rPILhiTJv7E. It's about abandoned ghost cities in China that get built to increase the GDP despite being vacant shells. There's lots of places like this in Dublin, huge new apartment complexes that are pretty much empty. They're not particularly evocative or strange or interesting at all, just boring non-places everywhere. There's one at Smithfield where a cinema used to be; the cinema closed and now it's just vacant space and pompous committee-designed murals with pictures of martin luther king jr and "sixties" design styles with "inspiring" quotes and a bookies with a few sad old men waiting outside. It's an enormous empty square, bigger than a soccer pitch. There's another in the old Docklands section of the city which is just abandoned office buildings dotted with a few coffee shops. It's pretty much entirely empty aside from builders and homeless people. There's a bunch of almost empty apartment complexes all around where I live too. In highschool I used to kind of want to live in one of those huge deserted buildings from Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep and it looks like I may well yet!!
edit:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5AlcksFgCg&feature=related ahahahaha
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLYVFnQzjtI&feature=related daphne oram the original chillwave