Have spent the past week or so in Bangalore. I was of course supposed to arrive here much earlier (the previous Tuesday, as a m.o.f.), but flight delays and uncooperative ticket agents conspired to ensure a protracted and rather harrowing journey. In fact, it is about the events surrounding the journey that this post is about.
Or perhaps not. To tell stories at this point would be anticlimactic; after all, we have come through, we have shone. The consternation that engulfed us when confronted with oppression has departed, leaving in its place a feeble impression of victory over circumstances, and a mistaken conflation of action with result. We have come apart at the seams and then reified ourselves, we cry. Is not this after all proof that we are masters of our own pliable destinies? That we can hold in submission, through assiduity and willpower, the selfsame ties that appear to bind us? Surely the transpiration of such a sequence of testing events with a satisfying, protagonist-affirming conclusion will show to any healthy skeptic the irrefutable proof of the non-existence of God, or even god; we need no divine mediation to perpetuate ourselves through our fraught existences. Our egos will suff--
I'm sorry about my friend. He looks like a philosopher. I remember in school when he used to win arguments with people by flooding them with big-big sentence constructions. Bored me like anything. See even here he is showing his stunts without telling what he is talking about. Anyway leave him. The story goes like this -- I was supposed to leave Austin on a Sunday morning, but the travel agent was not available on Sundays, and Sri Lankan airlines was also....no, wait...I went to the airport and that ticket-agent-wallah was so rude! He told me I had no reservation and then I had to call my uncle and then my mobile phone was going out of charge -- actually that was later, no? -- yeah, correct -- So first I --
Dude. Seriously. That was stupid. The problem with him is that he's just not with it, you know? I mean, seriously, who adds 'no' at the end of questions? That is so 20th century. Anyway at Chicago airport there was this totally cute chick with this lame dude. I mean, literally lame! He was going around on one of those gross wheelchairs and looked like fucking Stephen Hawking, man. They went in to one of those handicapped bathrooms. I bet they totally did it in there. I'd pretend be handicapped too if it gets me a d-cup. Anyway so there was this Chinese dude who was right next to me asking me if I was on the Frankfurt flight too. Like I'd tell him! What if he flicks my passport or something! Whatever. The ticket-agent chick was so ugh I went like call 911! We need an emergency plastic surgery! She was like so staring right at me ---
Please stop. You are nauseating me. Please ignore my friends above. They don't really mean anything they --
Friday, December 21, 2007
Friday, December 7, 2007
Bathos
How devoid life is of the climaxes that one observes elsewhere.
Today I taught my last class for the semester. I was of course acutely aware that this was to be my 'last class' this year, and my 'last day' with this particular batch of students; so aware, in fact, that it led to a certain perverse brand of self-consciousness that lent an imaginary gravity to the occasion, and assigned to it a wholly superfluous sentimentality. I thought to myself -- surely there will be some token event that will signal this occasion, some little flag that will unfurl to reveal a hidden significance. Surely my students will feel, much as I do, an enveloping melancholy that qualifies their joy at leaving the semester behind. Surely they are as affected by this as I am.
What happened, of course, contradicted everything I had hoped for. I was late to class for reasons that I could not have predicted, and some students -- who had perhaps decided that this last session need not be taken seriously -- had already settled down low in their chairs in an attitude of weariness. My entry to the classroom was met by an almost unanimous sigh of disapproval, and my subsequent efforts to revivify them were countered by an abiding passivity that proved nevertheless to be quite oppressive. The session had acquired an involuntary aspect of gloom, and I was needless to say quite affected by it myself; so much so that I ended it in (mostly dissembled) frustration about a half-hour later. My excitement and nascent self-consciousness had dissipated and was replaced by something much more diffident and perhaps also ineffable. There is nothing more frustrating than not being able to understand the source of one's frustration.
It is just as well. Imagine if the entire class had exploded, much as I had hoped they would, in a simultaneous expression of faux sentimentality; if they had given me a card, perhaps, or sung me a song. I would certainly have not been able to bear the embarrassment. (How fortunate we are that we can abominate in others qualities that we ourselves possess; how lost we would be without this irreplaceable talent.) That they had no desire to do these things leaves me a little doleful, but on the other hand the manufactured heaviness of the past few days is gone. Climaxes are on the whole better left to the imagination.
Today I taught my last class for the semester. I was of course acutely aware that this was to be my 'last class' this year, and my 'last day' with this particular batch of students; so aware, in fact, that it led to a certain perverse brand of self-consciousness that lent an imaginary gravity to the occasion, and assigned to it a wholly superfluous sentimentality. I thought to myself -- surely there will be some token event that will signal this occasion, some little flag that will unfurl to reveal a hidden significance. Surely my students will feel, much as I do, an enveloping melancholy that qualifies their joy at leaving the semester behind. Surely they are as affected by this as I am.
What happened, of course, contradicted everything I had hoped for. I was late to class for reasons that I could not have predicted, and some students -- who had perhaps decided that this last session need not be taken seriously -- had already settled down low in their chairs in an attitude of weariness. My entry to the classroom was met by an almost unanimous sigh of disapproval, and my subsequent efforts to revivify them were countered by an abiding passivity that proved nevertheless to be quite oppressive. The session had acquired an involuntary aspect of gloom, and I was needless to say quite affected by it myself; so much so that I ended it in (mostly dissembled) frustration about a half-hour later. My excitement and nascent self-consciousness had dissipated and was replaced by something much more diffident and perhaps also ineffable. There is nothing more frustrating than not being able to understand the source of one's frustration.
It is just as well. Imagine if the entire class had exploded, much as I had hoped they would, in a simultaneous expression of faux sentimentality; if they had given me a card, perhaps, or sung me a song. I would certainly have not been able to bear the embarrassment. (How fortunate we are that we can abominate in others qualities that we ourselves possess; how lost we would be without this irreplaceable talent.) That they had no desire to do these things leaves me a little doleful, but on the other hand the manufactured heaviness of the past few days is gone. Climaxes are on the whole better left to the imagination.
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