I took notes for a friend who missed class yesterday but when I gave him my notebook he said he couldn't read anything I had written because he never learned cursive writing. What?!

Apparently it was 80 degrees in Baltimore yesterday. In Syracuse, however, I walked through snow to get to class this morning. Obviously, my life is a cruel joke. God is having a nice little chuckle at my expense.

I honestly don't have anything to write about today. My brain is empty of thoughts.

I am sitting in a small cafe on campus, looking out the window at the people walking to class down below me. A lecture just let out of the law school auditorium. It's probably PSY 205 because I took that last semester and this was the end of the lecture time. The students streaming out of the law building onto the sidewalk look so very collegiate. Pretty young people in their warm coats carrying their bags filled with books. Some of them are walking in pairs and chatting together but most are either talking or texting on their cell phones or listening to their iPods. Everyone looks generally the same, College Student Q. It's interesting because I know that if I were walking among the students on the sidewalk I would be able to see the details of each person's day - a girl perusing notes for a test in her next class, a boy retelling a tale of college life to his brother on the phone, another clutching a large coffee thermos with the desperation that comes from sleep deprivation.

I am reminded of the chapter of Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life in which he is viewing Manhattan from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center* and considering how the life of the city can be "read" like a text when viewed from such a perspective.

"To be lifted to the summit of the World Trade Center is to be lifted out of the city's grasp. One's body is no longer clasped by the steets that turn and return it according to an anonymous law; nor is it possessed, whether as player or played, by the rumble of so many differences and by the nervousness of New York traffic. When one goes up there, he leaves behind the mass that carries off and mixes up in itself any identity of authors or spectators. An Icarus flying above these waters, he can ignore the devices of Daedalus in mobile and labyrinths far below. His elevation transfigures him into a voyeur. It puts him at a distance. It transforms the bewitching world by which one was 'posessed' into a text that lies before one's eyes. It allows one to read it, to be a solar Eye, looking down like a god. The exaltation of a scopic and gnostic drive: the fiction of knowledge is related to this lust to be a viewpoint and nothing more" (Certeau, 127).

I want to be a voyeur. Today I am viewing my college campus from above and I can read it like a text. And yet, Icarus' viewpoint is folly of course. He flies too high. And so, while I am fascinated by this scopic view of life displayed below me as a text, I am also aware that as a writer my role needs to be more than that. To be a writer is to be at once a viewpoint from a place on high and a character in the crowd. And to be a great writer is an even more challenging role - a voyeur who is also every character in the text at the same time.

And so today, as a writer I can look down upon the college campus spread below me and read the text of  its life, students and professors on their way to various scholarly experiences. But I also must be possessed by the characters in the scene and the story of this moment. If I were to write the story of this campus today, I couldn't just be looking down as a viewpoint on high (as I am now). I would also need to be every person that is walking across the quad - the girl with the plaid tote bag, the older professor who wears jeans to lecture, the boy carrying an ambiguous instrument in a black case (a trumpet? oboe? saxophone?). It's a daunting task**.

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Now, before I go to my next class, I will end this surprisingly thoughtful blog post with a bit of my real life:
Yesterday, I wrote someone a Facebook message that took quite a bit of courage to send. In fact, I wrote two previous versions of the message over the weekend and deleted them. It was an odd message. I knew I had something I wanted to say to this certain person but I just didn't know how to say it. There is something terrifying about that moment before you press "Send" on a message. As much as I thought about every possible outcome, in the end, I had no idea how the recipient of my message would respond, what he would think of the words I had chosen so carefully. I had to send the message into the tumultuous sea of possibility and wait.



*It is haunting to read his essay, which was written in 1984, in the post-9/11 world.

** I think this blogging habit is a constructive exercise for me. Just a few moments ago I was staring out the window, my mind blank and at a loss for words. But the very practice of sitting in front of a blank document gave me reason to nurture my vague thoughts and notions into a fuller form. And so this blog post about nothing ended up as another opportunity for me to explore my role as a writer.