Unfinished Product

Woke up late, but that is nothing unusual. I mechanically brushed my teeth and put the espresso machine on the stove. I can’t image how I used to get up at 5am, 6 days a week in order to get to school at 6:30 AM. (That was the rule; anyone who arrived late would have to stay after school for detention time. The detention was not long though, because the night class and study groups started at 7pm. A regular kid at our school spent most of his days at his desk. Imagine the three sessions of the day go like: 6:30am to 12:00 pm; 2pm to 6pm, then 7pm to 10pm. But that was long time ago.) The bus came late too, but I somehow ended up arriving at my class on time. Maybe I should get up late on a regular bases (taking the weekly statistics into serious consideration -- today was the only day I made it to school this week). More than 100 minutes of bus ride led me to a 90-minute class. I did not realize it was my last class for the semester, until our teacher thanked us at the end of the seminar. Wow, I have slept through so many of them since last October. I have become amazingly lazy since high school time; and yet, I am not unhappy having left the extremely strict school behind.

We learnt to point fingers at other nations besides our own, all the way through high school. In contrary in my current school, the seminars feel like a bunch of “finger pointing” too, but at ourselves. If the 90-minute lamentation directing at the “complete failure” of capitalism, or eating meat is mass-murder or the “melting-pot-society” is the highest achievement of human cultural form, I frequently remind myself that, at least there are disputes; imagine a class in which you have to write down everything the teacher says, the book says, and any disagreement could have you kissed good-bye to a higher education, or your parents “dropping by” teacher’s home after dinner with a red envelope containing a stack of cash.

Sometimes I am confused about how I feel about all of these: the goodness of self-critic vs. the “euphorication” of certain continent; the elitism reproaches to the society forgetting the majority of the population does not have graduate-school education; and how many hard-core vegans would pierce through own flesh so that a piece of metal can be hanged on the wound, or mark their own skin with needles and ink in some language that they don’t even speak. (Yes, I have known them in person.) What does refusing meat mean to you? What does your own body mean to you?

I owned a telescope. I saw the creators on the Moon and almost burnt my eyes blind when I forgot to add the filter. (As I bent over to adjust the angle, the Sun light burnt a small hole on my coat, and I was about to my eyes directly behind it. Lucky me.) In a starry night, I would spend hours on the house roof and aim for the silver tiny lights: the world around me felt weightless: does it matter to the universe that we are facing final exams in a few weeks? Does it matter that we eat meat or not? Does it matter how the nationals’ borders are defined? Does it matter if we stuck in the airport as the volcanoes erupt? Or the buses come late? Or the new policies take place? Or some avant garde fashion companies discontinue employing size-zero models?

Someone told me that humans were just nature’s experiment. If so, we are unfinished products.

Midterm crisis?

Midterm crisis?


Episode 1:

On the phone with Mom, our communication was more diplomatic than profound. She went through the usual questions about my meals and weight, about weather and clothes: my only vocabulary left, well practiced and repetitive like some verses from an absolute beginner. Then, she said:" There was a good TV program last night. A young literary critic wrote something and became national wide famous."

"What did he write?"

"Books. Something new."

"O...K..."

"He reminds me of you. Young and studies literature."

"Yes..." I felt that maybe I should give some positive feedback, but I did not know what to say.

"Anyway, he was on a talk show and it was very educative."

"What did you learn?"

"There are young people who do new researches in books and all."

"It is seldom to find educative programs on TV..." -- give me credit for trying.

I suddenly thought of food.

* Pizza Spinoza ( à la hollandaise? with spinach on the side.)
* Foucault focaccia (The truth about erotic sandwiches?)
* Leibniz Cookies (two sides of the story: chocolate and vanilla. If a proposition is true, then its negation is false and vice versa?)
* Kant in cans (What is Enlightenment? The magic of storing food for ages and ages and ages in a tin.)
* Hegel Bagels (It is human nature to keep bagels in mind?)
* Etc.

I thought about telling her my thoughts but we ended up talking about how much snow we got this year.


Episode 2

Raumkonzept Seminar

Everyone sat in the classroom with think bubbles in a form of a fast-going clock. We had another hour left.

The teacher checked her cellphone and said: "I have been thinking about Wellbery's Sense of Room and Room of Sense this weekend. And I believe that we don't have to understand the text as two different ideas but it would also be OK to think of it as relapses ... the idea to be applied ... well, then, I think, can be, through New York or through a text..." -- she was talking as slowly as she could. The times goes faster this way.

I wondered if she listened to herself when she spoke.

Then someone said that in his course of philosophy studies, there had been incidents where the discussions were so escalated until someone called the police.

"What was it about?" we asked.

"We were talking about Foucault. Then someone felt insulted so the police came. For a periode of time we had guarded classes. Some students were thrown out of the room." -- This is what our teacher dreamt of, maybe, some action is better than half of students on Facebook and the other half picking on their cuticles.

It is hard to imagine calling the police on a Foucault related discussion though. How did you tell the policeman? What would be the first thing to write down on their notes? Foucault is spelled with silent "-lt"?

Then the class continued.

"conceptual definition of a room... emotional coloring of a text ... witness of simulator ... "

We nodded periodically. Felling bad for all the silence in the room, but besides smiling and nodding there was nothing we could do.

Maybe the philosophical food joke would come in handy in this situation. But I did not want her to know that I understand "emotional coloring of a text" as literally taking a highlighter and mark the paper.

"OK." she checked her cellphone again. "This is our mid-term discussion. I hope that it has been helpful to you all."

We nodded.

"And next time, we will REALLY put something VERY concrete on the table."

I haven't heard this sentence since the second session of the semester.