Rhinocrisy

Wrote this yesterday. Does its job, and I can’t be bothered to improve it, so here it stays.

“The Maiden caught me in the Wild
   While I was dancing merrily
She put me into her Cabinet
   And Lockd me up with a golden Key”
   — William Blake, ‘The Crystal Cabinet’^*

When the downy promise of his chin had matured into golden curls, Yegor bade his mother good-bye and set out to seek his fortune. He had no possession other than the clothes he wore and his father’s sword, but he had kept the blade clean and sharp, and his wits even keener. So he whistled as he walked with the sun in his hair, sure that around the next corner the road led to treasure and fame.
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I went to drop off my dissertation with the registrar today, the last possible minute finally having arrived. It’s strange hearing the congratulations of strangers. I think to myself that they are praising me out of ignorance, because if they knew what little I have actually done, they would know I didn’t deserve it. This is the same doubt that has haunted me my whole life. My path has simply been navigating a maze that someone else built - there was a solution and a goal at the end that was already set out for me. It only required that I walk to the end. The truly intrepid, the brave and praiseworthy, cut their way through the maze and blaze their own trail, exploring the wide, wild country outside its walls. Now, what do I know about setting my own goals? The ones I imagine are far away, in the most untamed corner of the wilderness. And here I am, unknowing, feeling my lack. Can I navigate that wilderness, or will I be lost in the thicket, trapped by endless rows of snarls and thorns?

Sometimes I lose patience with people assuming what my next course will be - employment, marriage, stability. Should I continue to play my life out by rote? Can others truly bear to live their entire lives that way? Is it possible to never leave the boundaries of the maze, and to follow its familiar, monotonous walls back and forth in perpetuity? Other times I fear their assumption is correct. Only a fool ventures off into the unknown in pursuit of fabled treasures - the sort of romantic idiot who likens life to a fantastic voyage.

This is not how I imagined adulthood - learning to accept that you are a bug, and dreams are false, and heroes do not exist (or at least: you will never be one).

I am riding my bike from the bookbindery, to deliver my two copies of the document, and these dark thoughts cast a veil over the sunlit day. I lift my head to shake it away, to catch a glimpse of blue sky. A light rain strikes my face, just a kiss of descending mist. I’m gladdened by this bit of fairy magic. I look around me for the inevitable rainbow, but it cannot be seen. Its arch descends from directly above me. I am the pot of gold.

We humans have a nearly unparalleled lust for dramatic tension. Without it we are listless and deflated; with it, colors are more vivid, and the flavor of anticipation makes all tastes and smells more appealing. So we find it in all corners, and every squabble is magnified into a magnificent conflict - epic struggles against such redoubtable villains as the municipal recycling department, your roommate’s girlfriend, or that perennial favorite, the IRS.

Sometimes, though, this tension may be stretched thin, almost to breaking, and our pleasure becomes so acute it verges on agony. Thus the whole nation suffered for nearly three years before discovering the truth of Luke Skywalker’s parentage, and dies minor deaths every summer between television seasons. But the apotheosis of this sort of dramatic hyperextension I will illustrate by example:

Hiding my theft behind a convenient cloud of exhaled smoke, I recently availed myself of my roommate’s copy of “The Complete Prose Tales of Alexandr Sergeyevitch Pushkin”. The first tale, written in 1827, is “The Moor of Peter the Great”, which tells the story of the Tsar’s adopted godson, Ibrahim. He, though well-bred, genteel and charming, nevertheless must endure as an oddity in the courtly society of Europe due to his misplaced ancestry. Peter, blind to anything but his godson’s talents and fine qualities, arranges a match between Ibrahim and the (rather unwilling) young daughter of a Russian nobleman. By chapter seven, matters are coming to a head, when we are suddenly informed by parenthetical:

(Pushkin never completed this story.)

That makes 181 years and counting.

I have not paid my taxes yet for 2006.

If I were to pay my taxes, it is likely that a significant portion of those dollars will go towards funding the Iraq occupation, nuclear weapons, and a host of other military-industrial projects that I somehow can’t bring myself to masturbate about.^*

I am a poor individual, and my contribution in this regard will be meager. Specifically, I estimate that my total contribution to the Iraq War will be about $160,^† a mere billionth of the total cost of the war. I’m not sure what can be purchased for this amount, but I find it an alarmingly large quantity from my own perspective. I’m somewhat dismayed that my material contribution is so substantial. I could certainly do a lot that was less damaging to the world with that $160.

I’m not sure how guilty I should feel about this - refusal to pay means I might end up with severe debt or, in extremely unlikely scenarios, prison. Should I balance this against the fact that I’m purchasing bullets? Maybe those bullets go unused - maybe they’re only fired off in warning and not into someone’s spine. Maybe I pay for a soldier’s insulin supplement or boots. Whatever the case, ultimately I’m pitting a bit of my well-being against that of someone else.

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all.

^* Am I un-American?

^† Roughly, assuming I pay ~2700 in taxes and the Iraq budget is about $161 billion out of a total of $2600 billion in outlays for 2008.

2006 wasn’t an especially enjoyable year, for me. The latter half was definitely complete shit, as it saw me reacquainting myself with darker, foggier feelings. Some good friends of mine moved away from me, as well, and some others merely drifted a bit further off. Broken friendships are a sad thing, like little dead birds. Once they were sweet and joyous, and now at best they can remind you that they were a bright thing in the past.

It wasn’t all bad, however. I improved myself in a few ways. I took up a new instrument, the dhol, which is a kind of Punjabi drum. This was more or less on a whim, and I surprised myself by being a rather quick learner (the benefit of years of playing the tabla, another North Indian drum with fairly similar fundamental principles).

I also kept my New Years’ resolution of last year, which was to learn to dance better. I did it!

In 2007 I will make the earth shake and the sky turn golden. Watch out.

New poll on the right for you, my dears.

I’ve been battling depression again for the past few months. Actually, I haven’t been “battling” so much as “surrendering faster than Vichy France”. For those of you who have never been depressed, in my case this mostly consists of:

• Not doing much.
• Not thinking much.
• Sleeping a lot.

E.g., this morning I woke up, in a technical sense, at around 8:20, but for some reason felt the need to lie around listlessly in bed until about 11 before I actually dragged myself up and about. Also I’ve noticed that there’s a lot of dilly-dallying and shilly-shallying that needs to be done around my house lately.

I don’t ordinarily write about stuff like this, because it’s frankly boring and uninteresting, and I’m already boring and uninteresting at this point; so why compound it?

However: my roommate suggested to me recently that I might suffer from such a thing as “seasonal affective disorder”. This is basically shorthand for: “Gets sad in the wintertime.” It even has a reflexive acronym. Neat!

Normally I am prone to scoffing at spuriously labeled diseases (e.g., “ADD”, “IBS”, etc.), many of which I think are overdiagnosed or fictitious. I don’t have a good reason for these beliefs; I am merely a cantankerous and unreasonably contrary type of person in this regard. But I like the idea that I suffer from SAD. The short summary of the “disease” is that it’s a product of shorter daylight hours^*, which has some sort of unknown physiological effect (depressed serotonin or melatonin levels being a couple of hypotheses). Estimates of prevalence are as high as 10% of the population. This fits in with a lot of other genetic pre-determinisms I’ve formulated with regard to myself, including propensity to thinness, high metabolism, poor performance in cold weather, etc., reflecting my clear adaptation to warm, lower-lattitude climates.

The logical course of action is thus to move to Arizona. It has warm weather, much longer days in winter, no mosquitos (I think), lots of stars, and probably has a reasonable supply of peyote for producing mescaline. I intend to get right on this, as soon as I finish this damn PhD.

… revealing a man. Sometimes only a shell of a man; sometimes a maelstrom of light and potential that would be diminished by calling it a man. Today, he might as well be called a horse, for all he cares. Let the world do as it wills for the next eight hours - that’s the length of time required for his long, relieved exhalation.

I think I’m going to graduate after all.