Cinemorphosis

Tag: art

  • Feedback Latency Intolerance

    Feedback Latency Intolerance

    Feedback Latency Intolerance is the conditioned inability to endure even brief gaps between action and response, produced by prolonged immersion in systems that reward instantaneous acknowledgment. Under its influence, ordinary delays—seconds rather than minutes—register as emotional disturbances, triggering agitation, self-doubt, or irritation disproportionate to the circumstance. The condition collapses temporal perspective, converting neutral waiting into perceived absence or rejection. What is lost is not efficiency but patience: the learned capacity to exist without immediate validation. Feedback latency intolerance reveals how algorithmic environments retrain emotional regulation, replacing mature tolerance for delay with a reflexive demand for constant confirmation.

    The extent of my deterioration revealed itself recently at a new pancake house. I took my daughter, asked the server what he actually liked on the menu, and obediently ordered the fried chicken biscuit sandwich. Then—already overplaying the moment—I texted my wife to announce my choice, as if this were actionable intelligence. I stared at my phone, waiting for the small red numeral to appear, the sacred 1 that would certify my existence. Forty seconds passed. Forty. I refreshed my screen like a lab rat pressing a lever, convinced something had gone wrong with the universe.

    In that absurd interval, it dawned on me: I had entered a state of pathological impatience, the natural byproduct of prolonged residence in the dopamine swamp of algorithmic life, where self-worth is measured by speed and volume of response. The sensation felt disturbingly familiar. My mind snapped back to stories my mother told about feeding me as a baby. The spoon, freshly loaded with mashed potatoes, would leave my mouth for a brief, necessary refill—and I would erupt in fury, unable to tolerate the unbearable injustice of the spoon’s absence. I screamed not from hunger, but from interruption. Sitting there in the pancake house, refreshing my phone, I realized I had simply upgraded the spoon. This is what too much time inside these machines does to a person: it doesn’t make you faster or smarter—it makes you an adult who can’t survive a forty-second gap between bites.

  • Reproductive Incentive Conflict: Why College Rewards Appearances Over Depth

    Reproductive Incentive Conflict: Why College Rewards Appearances Over Depth

    Reproductive Incentive Conflict
    noun

    The tension that arises when the pursuit of long-term intellectual depth, integrity, and mastery competes with the immediate pressures of achieving economic and social status tied to reproductive success. Reproductive incentive conflict is most acute in environments like college, where young men intuit—often correctly—that mating markets reward visible outcomes such as income, confidence, and efficiency more reliably than invisible virtues like depth or craftsmanship. In such contexts, Deep Work offers no guaranteed conversion into status, while shortcuts, system-gaming, and AI-assisted performance promise faster, more legible returns. The conflict is not moral confusion but strategic strain: a choice between becoming excellent slowly or appearing successful quickly, with real social and reproductive consequences attached to each path.

    Chris Rock once sliced through the romance of meritocracy with a single joke about reproductive economics. If Beyoncé were working the fry station at McDonald’s, her attractiveness alone would not disqualify her from marrying Jay-Z. But reverse the roles—put Jay-Z in a paper hat handing out Happy Meals—and the fantasy collapses. The point is crude but accurate: in the mating market, men are judged less on raw appeal than on status, income, and visible competence. A man has to become something before he is considered desirable. It’s no mystery, then, why a young man entering college quietly factors reproductive success into his motivation. Grades aren’t just grades; they’re potential leverage in a future economy of attraction.

    Here’s where Cal Newport’s vision collides with reality. Newport urges Deep Work—slow, demanding, integrity-driven labor that resists shortcuts and defies easy metrics. Deep Work builds character and mastery, but it offers no guaranteed payout. It may lead to financial success, or it may not. Meanwhile, the student who bypasses depth with AI tools can often game the system, generating polished outputs and efficient performances that read as competence without the grind. The Deep Worker toils in obscurity while the system-gamer cashes visible wins. This creates a genuine tension: between becoming excellent in ways that compound slowly and appearing successful in ways that signal immediately. It’s not a failure of virtue; it’s a collision between two economies—one that rewards depth, and one that rewards display—and young men feel the pressure of that collision every time they open a laptop.

  • Inside the 2026 Spring Semester: Stupidification, Katrina, and the Myth of the Self-Made Man

    Inside the 2026 Spring Semester: Stupidification, Katrina, and the Myth of the Self-Made Man

    3 Essay Assignments for my Freshman Composition and Critical Thinking Classes, Spring 2026 Semester

    Freshman Composition Class

    Essay1: How Black Mirror Imagines the Stupidification of Social Media

    This essay prompt asks you to write a 1,700-word argumentative essay analyzing how the Black Mirror episodes “Joan Is Awful” and “Nosedive” portray the digitally intensified “stupidification” Jonathan Haidt describes in “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.” Your goal is to take a clear, debatable position on whether these episodes exaggerate social-media anxieties or accurately reflect the psychological and social pathologies shaping online life. In a 200–250 word introduction, you must define “stupidification” using Haidt’s key ideas—such as the Babel metaphor, outrage incentives, the collapse of shared reality, identity performance, and tribal signaling—and then connect these concepts to one concrete example from your own life or observations. End your introduction with a focused thesis evaluating how effectively the two episodes illuminate the realities of social-media-driven stupidity.

    Essay 2: Hurricane Katrina: Natural Disaster or Man-Made Catastrophe?

    This essay prompt asks you to write a 1,700-word argumentative essay on the claim that Hurricane Katrina was less a natural disaster than a national failure. Drawing on the documentaries Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time and Katrina: Come Hell and High Water, along with Clint Smith’s “Twenty Years After the Storm” and Nicholas Lemann’s “Why Hurricane Katrina Was Not a Natural Disaster,” you will analyze how government neglect, weak infrastructure, racial inequity, and media distortion contributed to the catastrophe. These works reveal a fourfold betrayal—red-lining, unprepared institutions, delayed aid, and harmful narratives—that left New Orleans, especially its Black communities, vulnerable and abandoned. Your essay should evaluate how systemic issues of race, class, and policy exacerbated the disaster while also exploring how families, neighborhoods, and cultural identity fostered resilience. Ultimately, you will consider what Katrina teaches us about justice, responsibility, and the human cost of institutional failure.

    Essay 3: The Myth of the Self-Made Man

    Many commentators, institutions, and public narratives present Frederick Douglass as the quintessential “self-made man,” using his rise from slavery to argue that personal discipline and individual grit are enough to overcome oppression. Write an essay analyzing why Douglass is framed this way: What political, cultural, or ideological purposes does this simplified narrative serve, and what parts of Douglass’s life and writing does it erase? Then, drawing on one or more of the following—Get Out, Black Panther, The Evolution of the Black Quarterback, and ALLENIV3SON—argue how these works challenge the myth that individual effort alone is sufficient to escape a modern form of the “Sunken Place.” Use evidence from Douglass and your chosen texts, address at least one counterargument, and provide a reasoned rebuttal.

    Critical Thinking Class

    Essay 1: Shame as Entertainment: The Myth of Moral Fitness in The Biggest Loser

    With 70 percent of Americans now overweight or obese, it’s no wonder the nation is obsessed with weight loss. That obsession fuels a vast industry of diets, influencers, and reality shows, none more infamous than The Biggest Loser. The series, which became the subject of the three-part docuseries Fit for TV: The Reality of The Biggest Loser, reveals how television turned the suffering of overweight people into prime-time entertainment. Contestants were pushed, shamed, and humiliated under the guise of “motivation.” The so-called fitness experts preached self-discipline, grit, and moral purity, but what they really offered was a cocktail of cruelty and pseudoscience disguised as inspiration. In a 1,700-word essay, analyze how the abuse documented in Fit for TV exposes the deeper myths behind weight loss culture. Drawing on Fit for TV, Julia Belluz and Kevin Hall’s essay “It’s Not You. It’s the Food,” and Rebecca Johns’s “A Diet Writer’s Regrets,” develop an argument that answers this question:

    What is intrinsically abusive about the gospel of self-discipline in weight loss, and how does this ideology blind us to the systemic causes of obesity while offering a hollow sense of meaning through influencers and their heroic panaceas? Your essay must include a counterargument and rebuttal section and a Works Cited page in MLA format with at least three sources.

    Essay 2: Ozempification and the Age of De-Skilling

    This essay prompt asks you to write a 1,700-word argumentative essay on whether dependence on AI always harms human skill—or whether, in some cases, it can be “bad but worth it.” Drawing on Kwame Anthony Appiah’s “The Age of De-Skilling,” you will use his distinctions between corrosive de-skilling, “bad but worth it” de-skilling, and unacceptable forms of de-skilling to evaluate how AI affects our thinking, creativity, and agency. You must take a clear position on whether AI meaningfully frees us for deeper work or mostly dulls our abilities and trains us into passivity. Your essay should distinguish between lazy reliance on AI and intentional collaboration with it, include a counterargument–rebuttal section, and incorporate an example of Ozempification—the growing cultural pattern in which people outsource effort, discipline, or agency to an external system, becoming passive “users” rather than active participants—from a Black Mirror episode such as “Joan Is Awful,” “Nosedive,” or “Smithereens.” You are required to use at least three sources in MLA format, including Appiah.

    Essay 3: The Whole Truth About Ultra-Processed Foods

    Using Olga Khazan’s “Avoiding Ultra-Processed Foods Is Completely Unrealistic,” Dhruv Khullar’s “Why Is the American Diet So Deadly?” and Julia Belluz and Kevin Hall’s “It’s Not You. It’s the Food” as your central texts, write a 1,700-word argumentative essay analyzing whether ultra-processed foods deserve their reputation as the villain of modern nutrition. Evaluate the claim that the only truly healthy diet is one built exclusively on whole foods.

    In your essay, define what counts as “whole,” “processed,” and “ultra-processed,” and analyze how clear or meaningful these categories actually are. Then examine the real-world constraints shaping American diets, including economics, time, geography, marketing, and systemic inequities. How realistic is it for the average eater to avoid ultra-processed foods altogether? What trade-offs—financial, cultural, and practical—shape people’s choices?

    As part of your argument, consider how emerging tools like GLP-1 medications or AI-guided meal planning may influence how we define “healthy eating.” Do these tools expand options for overwhelmed consumers, or push us toward a future where food becomes less cultural and more optimized?

    Your essay must include one counterargument–rebuttal section and an MLA Works Cited page with at least four sources.

  • Thou Shalt Drive On–And Never Look Back at the Van

    Thou Shalt Drive On–And Never Look Back at the Van

    When I was in high school, I watched four of my friends lose their minds over a single missed opportunity—a sunburned Greek tragedy in cutoffs and tube socks. Their decline began on a blistering afternoon in 1979, somewhere along the Grapevine—the steep, snaking pass that connects Northern and Southern California, or, in their case, paradise and perdition.

    The boys were headed south from the Bay Area to see the Dodgers in the playoffs, crammed in a sun-faded Chevy with the naïve optimism only teenage men possess. As they crested the Grapevine, they saw it: an orange, rust-flaked Volkswagen van steaming on the shoulder like a dying dragon. Around it stood four women—tanned, sweat-slick, and shimmering with mischief—Grateful Dead followers on their pilgrimage from chaos to Santa Barbara.

    The women waved tie-dye bikini tops like tribal flags and laughed with the wild, lawless energy of people who had never read a syllabus. My friends, being equal parts chivalrous and hormonally desperate, pulled over to help. They poured water into the boiling radiator, wiped their hands on their jeans, and were rewarded with radiant gratitude.

    “Come to the Summer Solstice Festival in Santa Barbara,” one of the Deadheads said, her voice a siren’s hum. “We’ll dance all night.”

    But my friends were men of purpose—or so they claimed. They had Dodgers tickets. Commitments. Civic duty. They politely declined, waved farewell, and continued toward Los Angeles, confident they’d made the adult decision.

    By the time they returned north, they were inconsolable.

    For the rest of high school, they fought bitterly over who had ruined their collective destiny. One blamed the driver for not turning around. Another accused the navigator of cowardice. They’d get drunk and rant about the “Lost Women of the Grapevine,” pounding tables and recounting their tragedy like war veterans mourning the platoon they never joined.

    One night, two of them came to blows at a house party, fists flying over the ghosts of imaginary Deadheads. I stepped in to break it up, only to catch a stray right hook to the temple.

    That night, nursing my swelling head with a washcloth, I turned to Master Po for enlightenment.

    “Master,” I asked, “how can one brief encounter with beautiful women destroy the minds of four men?”

    “Ah,” he said, “let this be your lesson, Grasshopper. The past is a seductive liar. When you cling to it, you feed it power it does not deserve. You transform an ordinary disappointment into a mythological Eden from which you’ve been exiled. And soon, you worship the loss itself.”

    He stroked his beard and added, “Living in the past is the mother of depression. Living in the future is the mother of anxiety. Living in the present, Grasshopper, is the mother of peace.”

    “But Master,” I said, “what if the past is more exciting than the present? And what if I enjoy being miserable?”

    “That is two questions,” he said.

    “Sorry, Master.”

    He nodded. “The past only seems exciting because you edit it like a movie trailer. You cut out the boredom, the sweat, the traffic, and the bad sandwiches. What remains is illusion—a highlight reel of what never truly was.”

    I pressed on. “But why do I sometimes poke at my pain—like pressing a sore tooth—just to feel alive?”

    “You are impoverished,” said Po.

    “I feel empty.”

    “Then you are filled,” he replied. “The Way does not strive, yet it overcomes. You are striving too hard, Grasshopper. Let go of the Grapevine.”

    I tried, but some part of me still saw my four friends stranded forever on that California pass, staring down the road where the van once shimmered in the heat—a mirage of desire that would haunt them long after their teenage tan lines had faded.

  • Blast from the Past: Telefunken Banjo Automatic

    Blast from the Past: Telefunken Banjo Automatic

    Six inches tall and barely ten inches across, the Telefunken Banjo Automatic delivers a lot of effortless sound for a radio its size. This vintage came in good shape as the seller had cleaned it up, even took it apart and did a “deep clean” to all the knobs. So there’s no static to speak of. This arrived with no AC. It’s feeding of six C batteries.

    Don’t be fooled by the swanky yellow. This colorful radio has outstanding FM reception and while the AM is above average it cannot light a candle to my bigger, brawnier Telefunken Partner 700, which at $40, cost me about half of the Banjo price. 

    The Banjo’s controls are smooth, and this bright yellow Telefunken feels upscale through and through, but if you’re Telefunken hunting, I recommend the bigger Partner 700. As good as the spunky yellow Banjo is, its speaker sound and AM sound loses to its bigger, more serious cousin. 

    In some ways it’s not fair to compare the two Telefunkens. The Banjo is a smaller portable, the Partner a heavier table radio. If I compare the Banjo to the similar sized Sangean PR-D5, the Banjo wins in speaker sound. The PR-D5’s small stereo speakers are so tinny my ears have trouble picking up the sound. In contrast, the Banjo fills a room easily. The FM on the Banjo is better than the PR-D5 and AM sound is similar. Of course, the $80 PR-D5 is new and digital and has presets so the comparison doesn’t quite work either.

    One strange quirk about the Banjo that I’ve never encountered before is that AM numbers are inverse to the FM numbers so that 103.1 FM, for example, is close to 640 AM. Strange, but no big deal.

    If you’re looking for a small travel companion, the Banjo is high-end and will not disappoint. If you’re looking for the majesty of a Panasonic RF-3000 (one just sold for over $300) and want to save some dough, check out the Partner 700, which I stole for $40.

    IMG_3564

  • Blast from the Past: Panasonic RF-3000, The Tank

    I picked up the package of the Panasonic RF-3000 and could already feel the presence of greatness evidenced by the density of the box. Inside was a 25-pound radio. What do today’s radios weigh? Two pounds?

    The heft of this vintage reminds me of a beloved car my parents bought, a brand new 1967 Chrysler Newport. My parents loved that car and would still have it today except that a troubled neighbor boy attempted to steal the car in 1974 or 1975. The car rolled down the steep hill of a street we lived on and was totaled (as a side note that same troubled boy stole another car a few years later, crashed it, and suffered permanent brain damage, but I digress).

    My point is today’s products are cheap and often chintzy. This can not be said of the solid looking RF-3000. Its only flaws are that twice the previous owner, suffering from dotage presumably, felt compelled to inscribe his social security on the radio. Perhaps this is a testament to his proprietary love of the radio, well deserved. In any case, the person managing the deceased radio owner’s estate disclosed this flaw on eBay. Sorry, there’s something unwittingly macabre about this review. Please let me proceed. 

    Why does a man want a heavy radio? The same reason a man wants 300-500 horsepower in his sport sedan. One word: Confidence. The RF-3000 delivers and more.  

    I turned on the RF-3000 and was stunned by crystal clarity and a salient quality of sound that in my subjective mind may eclipse its legendary brother, the RF-2200. Stations came in with ease. The birdy on the dreaded 710 AM vanished with a slight rotation of the hulking 3000. 88.9 KXLU came in loud and clear. Same for 89.3 and 103.1, other touchy stations. Let’s get real. The 3000 puts today’s radios to utter shame (forgive me, but hyperbolic emotion lends itself to cliche).

    IMG_3362

    This radio is huge. My wife says it looks like a relic from The Hatch in ABC’s hit TV show Lost. As I said earlier, it evokes the grand heft of my parents’ 1967 Chrysler Newport. 

    What did I pay for this booming radio that is so solid I am reminded of the hull of a cruise ship? A paltry $87. You can buy some mediocre radios out there for twice that much. I’m glad I snatched this thing. What a treasure. File the vintage RF-3000 as more grist for middle-aged curmudgeonly men to rant and bicker about the loss of quality in the Modern Age. 

    IMG_3363
  • Comparing the Tecsun PL-660 and the PL-680: Why the 660 Is Better for Me

    Comparing the Tecsun PL-660 and the PL-680: Why the 660 Is Better for Me

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    I picked up an open-box Tecsun PL-680 for a huge discount, a deal too good to resist. Did I need it? Absolutely not. I already own the Tecsun PL-660, its near-identical twin. But this wasn’t a rational purchase—this was a radio-fueled nostalgia binge, a return to my obsession from 15 years ago. I love these radios. I love their design, their buttons, their retro Cold War aesthetic. And let’s be honest—I just wanted to compare them.

    First Impressions:

    I expected to prefer the PL-660’s design, but the PL-680 surprised me. It has a slightly different look, and now that I have both, I can’t pick a favorite. They’re like fraternal twins with great reception and a questionable resale value.

    Performance Check:

    • AM/FM Reception? Identical—stellar sensitivity, fantastic clarity, and minimal RFI (unlike my finicky DSP radios).
    • Speaker Sound? Nearly indistinguishable, though the PL-680 might have a hair more output—but if you blindfolded me, I doubt I could tell the difference.
    • Compared to My Tecsun PL-880 & PL-990? Not even close—those two have the richer, fuller audio these models lack.

    The Unexpected Revelation:

    Now here’s where things get weird—the Qodosen DX-286, a smaller, less expensive radio, outshines them in speaker quality. It sounds richer, deeper, fuller, like it’s punching out a solid 3 watts of audio muscle compared to the 1-watt Tecsuns. Suddenly, I found myself fantasizing about a “Super Qodosen”—a 10-watt speaker beast, with a sturdy kickstand and a 7.5-inch chassis, like the Tecsun 660 and 680. If someone built that, I’d throw money at it immediately.

    Do I Prefer the Qodosen Overall?

    The short answer is no. Its short telescopic antenna can limit FM in some areas of the house and other owners tell me it really shines with an elongated FM antenna, which fits in the 3.5mm jack. This is inconvenient for some.

    Also, I’ve learned that I can enjoy the speaker sound on both the 660 and 680 by turning the Treble/Bass switch to Bass, a personal preference. 

    Buyer’s Remorse?

    Not a chance. These are legendary performers, and more importantly, they’re relics of my Radio Obsession 1.0 days. Nostalgia, curiosity, and a good deal—that’s all the justification I need.

    Update:

    After a month of comparing the two, I much prefer the 660 because the 680 fades in and out of LAist 89.3 causing huge volume fluctuations. I don’t have this problem with the 660. I’m using the 680 in my garage for my kettlebell workouts and close to the outside parkway, the clear reception helps the 680 so I don’t get those volume fluctuations. 

    680 Alone

  • Richard Brody vs. the Algorithm: A Critic’s Lament in a Post-Print World

    Richard Brody vs. the Algorithm: A Critic’s Lament in a Post-Print World

    In his essay “In Defense of the Traditional Review,” New Yorker critic Richard Brody goes to battle against The New York Times’ editorial decision to shift arts criticism—from the long-form written review to short-form videos designed for a digital audience. It’s a cultural downgrade, Brody argues, a move from substance to performance, from sustained reflection to algorithm-choked ephemera. The move may be pitched as modernization, but Brody sees it for what it is: intellectual compromise dressed up as digital innovation.

    Brody’s stance isn’t anti-technology. He concedes we can chew gum and walk at the same time—that written essays and short videos can coexist. But his core concern is that the center of criticism is the written word. Shift the balance too far toward video, and you risk gutting that center entirely. Worse, video reviews tend to drift toward celebrity interviews and promotional puffery. The fear isn’t hypothetical. When given the choice between a serious review and a clip featuring a celebrity making faces in a car, algorithms will reward the latter. And so criticism is flattened into entertainment, and standards dissolve beneath a rising tide of digital applause.

    Brody’s alarm resonates with me, because I’ve spent the last four decades teaching college writing and watching the same cultural drift. Long books are gone. In many cases, books are gone altogether. We assign short essays because that’s what students can handle. And yet, paradoxically, I’ve never seen such sharp classroom discussions, never written better prompts, never witnessed better argumentation than I do today. The intellectual work isn’t dead—it’s just found new vessels. Brody is right to warn against cultural decay, but the answer isn’t clinging to vanished ideals. It’s adaptation with integrity. If we don’t evolve, we lose our audience. But if we adapt wisely, we might still reach them—and even challenge them—where they are.

  • The Portrait of the Artist as a Sweaty Young Man

    The Portrait of the Artist as a Sweaty Young Man

    The Portrait of the Artist as a Sweaty Young Man
    by Jeff McMahon

    Jeff McMahon was supposed to be a titan—or so he believed. His father, a man so dominant he once stole McMahon’s future mother from none other than General John Shalikashvili with the cold-blooded finesse of a Komodo dragon, radiated command like a halogen lamp. In the long shadow of that military bearing, McMahon sought to carve out his own myth—one barbell at a time.

    As a competitive Olympic weightlifter and golden-era bodybuilder in the 1970s, McMahon sculpted not just muscle, but identity. He was a Greek statue in motion, a walking promise of masculine potential. But while others were flexing in the mirror, he was gasping for air in a high school locker room, undone not by physical strain, but by panic attacks, a Nabokov fixation, and a Kafkaesque obsession with grammar. This was not ascension to Mount Olympus. This was implosion.

    The Portrait of the Artist as a Sweaty Young Man is a semiautobiographical novel in two acts. The first unfolds in the sun-drenched, protein-soaked Bay Area of the 1970s, where McMahon trained alongside a tribe of emotionally stunted muscleheads. The second takes place decades later, when he emerges as a reluctant intellectual—still jacked, still haunted—teaching college writing in a desert town where ambition goes to die and office politics are played with knives.

    Told in the second person, the novel is both an interrogation and a darkly comic trial of McMahon’s younger self—a character he observes with a mix of horror, sympathy, and disbelief. This is not a story of triumph, but the brutally funny autopsy of one. With merciless wit and an eye for the absurd, McMahon dismantles the treacherous myth of transformation and the masculine delusion that biceps can shield one from existential despair.

    For Gen X and Boomer men raised on Schwarzenegger and Bukowski, now softening into middle age and Googling blood pressure medication, Sweaty Young Man punctures the performance-driven culture of the gym, the classroom, and the self-help aisle. What begins as a memoir of obsession and physicality ends as a meditation on identity, shame, nostalgia, and the slow, bewildering shift from symbol to person.

    This is McMahon’s offering to the younger man he once was—the sweaty, striving, half-mad lifter who believed that heroism could be bench-pressed. He was wrong. But he was trying.

    And that’s where the story begins.

  • Operation 2B: Writing at the Edge of Madness

    Operation 2B: Writing at the Edge of Madness

    Last night, I dreamed I was recruited into a top-secret engineering project. Why? I have no idea. I’m not an engineer. I don’t calculate. I conjugate. But apparently, someone in a conference room with clearance and questionable judgment decided that this classified operation needed… a writer.

    They dropped me into a government-issue apartment compound, a cheerless complex filled with bunking engineers and low-grade existential dread. I was assigned a shared unit with mismatched strangers. One of them, a single mother, had laid out a modest spread of peanut butter, celery, and crackers for her toddler—a rationed still life of parental competence. “Eat,” she told me. “You’ll need fuel for the project.” And so I did—voraciously, like a man preparing to write the Constitution on deadline.

    One by one, my roommates peeled off to private rooms. There was a charming British expat with a silver beard and a childhood photo of himself in a Bentley—Old Money in exile. Despite his aristocratic roots, he was delightfully upbeat, the kind of man who would whistle while burying landmines. But soon, he too was reassigned. It became clear that my “team” had evaporated, and I had been left behind. Not fired. Not forgotten. Just… chosen. To work alone. On a project I didn’t understand. Surrounded by a sea of mechanical pencils. Hundreds of them, like offerings at the altar of Bureaucratic Futility.

    Feeling the weight of vague responsibility, I walked to the project site—a sprawl of white dust and scattered canopies that looked more like a failed music festival than a classified facility. Under one tent, I found two twenty-somethings playing at adulthood. I asked the woman which pencil I should use. She shrugged but confessed the 2B graphite was easiest on her eyes. A clue. A preference. A hierarchy of legibility. I realized she would be my proofreader, my silent companion in this ridiculous odyssey.

    Then came the sign. A man appeared—former military, highly decorated, looking like a character drafted from a Tom Clancy novel. Without a word, he walked up to my apartment door and placed a sign the size of a license plate in the window frame: BE COURAGEOUS. The kind of sign you see right before a high-stakes mission or a TED Talk.

    And that was it. My mission was mine alone. A 500-page manuscript I had to read to prepare myself for the project. No advisor, no support, no backup—just me, a pile of pencils, and a shadowy proofreader who preferred 2B. I awoke shortly after, microwaved some buckwheat groats, brewed a pot of dark roast coffee, and stared into my kitchen tiles wondering if this was a dream about writing… or about surviving it.