Last winter I went to Disney World with a couple of friends, and while other visitors waited in seemingly endless lines to go on the newest rides — rides that turn you upside-down, rides that skim precipitous drops, rides that accelerate at ungodly rates that bring to mind scenes from cartoons in which a character’s body shoots forward while his head remains behind, his neck stretching comically long — we spent our most pleasant late afternoons and evenings in that haven for pregnant women and children who are not yet “this tall”: Tomorrowland. Contrary to what its name suggests, Tomorrowland is less a peek into the future and more a glimpse into the past; the “tomorrow” to which it refers was decades ago. It is filled with rides and exhibits that were sleek and modern 40 years ago but now seem quaint and adorably misguided, like a drawing done by a five-year-old.

The gem of the Tomorrowland collection is the Carousel of Progress. Originally built for the 1960 World’s Fair in collaboration with General Electric, the Carousel cycles riders through four animatronic dioramas taking place in different times — the turn of the 20th century, 1920, 1940 and “today” — each of which features the same family boasting about their newest technological comforts. When G.E. withdrew their sponsorship in the early 1990s, the Carousel was refurbished, both to eliminate all mentions of G.E. and to modernize “today’s” diorama. The updated take-home message, very much a vestige of the early nineties and once again adorably misguided, seems to be that videophones are the wave of the future and will revolutionize telecommunications as we know it.
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My senior year begins tomorrow, which means that the past week has been filled with the hustle and bustle of compensating for a somewhat lackadaisical break; as my last real summer vacation draws to a close, I survey the crumpled to-do lists that litter my desk, the unanswered e-mails that fill my inbox, the abandoned beginnings of dozens of projects that never really left the ground and I realize: I could have done so much more. This disappointing realization has led to a last-ditch flurry of reading, and my mind has been racing with the listless, unbounded energy that comes from finishing a good book — the desire to create something, to do something extraordinary with my life.

But that will have to wait, because right now I’m watching the Food Network.

Last Monday I moved into a new apartment, and when I turned on the television I discovered that I inexplicably had cable. (Should I be writing that in a public forum? I swear I had nothing to do with it, kind people at Time Warner!) Suddenly the world was at my fingertips, if by “the world” I mean SpikeTV, TNN, and BET. No longer would I bask in the loneliness of a yet-to-be-filled four-bedroom apartment; no, my chores, my seemingly endless cleaning and putting away of unidentifiable kitchen implements would be accompanied by the glow of a hundred rosy faces, each in his own sparkling kitchen.
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