Tuesday, April 06, 2004

dispatch from my bed

Again, I continue to swoon over my new wireless capabilities. I recognize that I'm a little late in coming around to this whole wireless thing, but don't spoil my bliss...

When I'm not being fortified by my new enthusiasm for wireless, I keep thinking about the (repeated) line in Eternal Sunshine where Clementine says, "I am not a concept!" The line was especially apropos, of course, because you could easily see where Clementine really, at bottom, was pretty much a concept. I don't think she ever really moved past being a concept in the screenwriter and director's minds for example, although she was at least a pretty winning concept (my friend from Beauxbaton dissents furiously on this issue).

I'm trying now to think of which of the people I know are really basically concepts. (I mean, besides [insert name here].) Do people that are concepts know they are concepts? Is it a burden, having to be a concept all the time? Or is it like what Mark Twain said about how if you establish a reputation as a hard-worker you can thereafter sleep until noon--meaning that once you have established yourself as a concept, you can pretty much relax and everything you subsequently do will be seen in terms of the concept anyway.

And, then, of course, being ever-so-self-absorbed, I wonder if there are people who regard me as basically a concept. Or as someone who is aspiring to be a concept. God, how awful would that be to be seen as someone who was really wanting to be just a concept and yet couldn't pull it off and had to be relegated to the status of a conceptual poseur who couldn't get their act together enough to be anything more deftly defined or abstractly resonant than just, you know, another person.

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