I am reading Orwell, walking home in the twilight. Already, he is changing me. I look at sentences I have written, and I am ashamed of them. They appear to me now like misshapen behemoths, clomping destructively over sense and meaning, yet not getting anywhere very particular. Crippled by a heavy load of unnecessary adjectives and surplus clauses that have not been loaded onto them very securely, they seem to stagger in blind circles around the thing I am trying to say. No wonder my thoughts flee from them. How can my readers stand the awful spectacle?

Too, I am ashamed of looking at the dark wisps of cloud skidding across the pearly pink sky and thinking of a brightly lit livingroom and an evening with House and Jericho. I should not like tripe, and I should not want to waste my time on pasteboard dramas. If I were Eric Blair, I would be in Darfur or Palestine, fighting for something worth that vague sense of the eternal brushing across my consciousness as I contemplate the sunset.

I laugh, because at heart I am an impressionable undergraduate still.