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Something creepy just happened, maybe? This is one of those situations that could have just been drunk guys and could have been a murder party. It is midnight here, and I heard a shriek from the apartment across from mine. So I hurried into the hall calling out to ask if everyone was all right and if anyone needed help, as you do. When I didn't get an answer immediately, I knocked on the door, and two men opened it. They were holding beers and seemed drunk but genial. They reassured me that it was just one of them who'd yelled, and that everything (and -one) was fine. The one who'd answered the door shook my hand, but kept holding it after he'd shaken it, even when I tried to withdraw slightly. He asked my name and which apartment was mine, which I told them, and then he asked: "Do you live there all alone, or with your husband?"
That was about when I wigged out of there just as fast as less-than-polite haste could take me, because in what world does that not also sound a whole lot like "So, is there anyone else there who knows where you are and will notice immediately if you disappear?" I haven't heard any further screaming, so hopefully they're just partying more circumspectly and haven't, say, silenced their victim.
In summary, I might get axe-murdered by the new neighbors. I've already emailed Lily to let her know that if I disappear without warning, please feed the cats and let the police know whodunnit.
(I'm not seriously worried about murder happening, otherwise I'd be halfway to the police by now, but it made me uneasy enough that I wanted someone else in the building to know what happened and who was involved.)
That was about when I wigged out of there just as fast as less-than-polite haste could take me, because in what world does that not also sound a whole lot like "So, is there anyone else there who knows where you are and will notice immediately if you disappear?" I haven't heard any further screaming, so hopefully they're just partying more circumspectly and haven't, say, silenced their victim.
In summary, I might get axe-murdered by the new neighbors. I've already emailed Lily to let her know that if I disappear without warning, please feed the cats and let the police know whodunnit.
(I'm not seriously worried about murder happening, otherwise I'd be halfway to the police by now, but it made me uneasy enough that I wanted someone else in the building to know what happened and who was involved.)
(no subject)
Apr. 3rd, 2013 04:31 pmThat awkward moment when I default back to classroom social norms and raise my hand in order to talk at a meeting.
I'll be over here in the corner, alternating between laughing at myself and combusting from embarrassment.
I'll be over here in the corner, alternating between laughing at myself and combusting from embarrassment.
Insight isn't always fun
Feb. 26th, 2011 09:39 pmI had my first face-to-face conversation with someone who's anti-choice yesterday. That is, I'm sure I've had plenty of conversations with anti-choice people, since we typically don't walk around with labels on our foreheads, but this was the first time I ended up arguing about the right to abortion with someone I know, respected as a peer, and need to interact with on a regular basis.
I am not a good debater unless I am emotionally disengaged. When I get nervous I get flustered, I talk too fast, my palms start sweating, I start second-guessing myself and playing out threads of possible arguments and counter-arguments like a crazy unraveling tapestry of potential futures until I lose track of the points I need to be making in the moment. What I need to do is slow down, listen to my partner's arguments as they're articulated, and respond to them one by one. Once the adrenaline shock of having something I care about deeply under attack hits, that logic invariably fails.
When a man looks at me and calmly says that he would have no problem letting me die, or my mother die, or any of my friends with uteri die, my immediate reaction is an overwhelming mixture of fury and fear that makes it very hard to disengage. Of course, it's never couched in those terms. It's always "the woman," a comforting abstract. He wouldn't have any problem letting a faceless, nameless woman die even if the pregnancy would kill her, or maim her, because there might be a chance that the fetus could survive, even if it were only for a few weeks past birth. I let myself be drawn into a confused argument about how we judge the percentage of risks to the mother and fetus, which in retrospect was an incredibly bad choice. I tried to explain that bodily autonomy shouldn't be eliminated in this case and only in this case; we wouldn't let an adult human use another person as life support without that person's consent, so why should it be different for a fetus? I brought up the classic comparison with forced organ donations - he has two healthy kidneys, shouldn't he give one up, since the health risks to him are so minimal and somebody else needs one to survive? "Why would I do that?" he asked, and that was all he would say when I tried to make the parallel more explicit. I have rarely wanted to seize and shake somebody so badly in my life.
That was when he quite literally told me that being forced to carry a pregnancy to term and face all of the health risks associated with it was just the consequence of being born with a uterus. It wasn't his fault, it was just nature. You could probably hear the gears in my brain grinding against each other while I stared at him in sheer, abject horror. I pointed out that he was currently wearing glasses, which was going against nature, and that if he developed cancer as a result of a genetic predisposition he wouldn't decide not to treat it just because nature had given him that vulnerability. He didn't care. Those arguments were simply not applicable in his frame of reference. He blatantly did not care about any of the points that I made, and I probably wasn't making them as effectively as I could have.
Fortunately, he has no intention of going into ob-gyn. Even more importantly, he's willing to refer to another physician so long as there are doctors willing and able to prescribe or perform the appropriate services. I'll never be able to look at him the same way, though. No matter how reasonable and kind he seems when interacting with our classmates, there'll always be the little internal voice reminding me that he thinks a woman should be forced to carry to term even if it kills her.
I wonder if he'll have the opposite reservations about me, or if it just doesn't matter enough to him.
Emotions aren't a weakness. Studies have shown that without emotions we make decisions that produce more harm than good, often to ourselves; it's one of the major reasons that bad sociopaths are caught so easily. (Good sociopaths learn how to mimic emotions well enough to fool most everyone.) When somebody tells you that they don't believe you have the right control your own body, it's irrational not to react strongly. What I need to do is learn how to take a mental step back and channel the initial emotional gutpunch into a galvanizing force rather than let it throw my thoughts into disarray.
I am not a good debater unless I am emotionally disengaged. When I get nervous I get flustered, I talk too fast, my palms start sweating, I start second-guessing myself and playing out threads of possible arguments and counter-arguments like a crazy unraveling tapestry of potential futures until I lose track of the points I need to be making in the moment. What I need to do is slow down, listen to my partner's arguments as they're articulated, and respond to them one by one. Once the adrenaline shock of having something I care about deeply under attack hits, that logic invariably fails.
When a man looks at me and calmly says that he would have no problem letting me die, or my mother die, or any of my friends with uteri die, my immediate reaction is an overwhelming mixture of fury and fear that makes it very hard to disengage. Of course, it's never couched in those terms. It's always "the woman," a comforting abstract. He wouldn't have any problem letting a faceless, nameless woman die even if the pregnancy would kill her, or maim her, because there might be a chance that the fetus could survive, even if it were only for a few weeks past birth. I let myself be drawn into a confused argument about how we judge the percentage of risks to the mother and fetus, which in retrospect was an incredibly bad choice. I tried to explain that bodily autonomy shouldn't be eliminated in this case and only in this case; we wouldn't let an adult human use another person as life support without that person's consent, so why should it be different for a fetus? I brought up the classic comparison with forced organ donations - he has two healthy kidneys, shouldn't he give one up, since the health risks to him are so minimal and somebody else needs one to survive? "Why would I do that?" he asked, and that was all he would say when I tried to make the parallel more explicit. I have rarely wanted to seize and shake somebody so badly in my life.
That was when he quite literally told me that being forced to carry a pregnancy to term and face all of the health risks associated with it was just the consequence of being born with a uterus. It wasn't his fault, it was just nature. You could probably hear the gears in my brain grinding against each other while I stared at him in sheer, abject horror. I pointed out that he was currently wearing glasses, which was going against nature, and that if he developed cancer as a result of a genetic predisposition he wouldn't decide not to treat it just because nature had given him that vulnerability. He didn't care. Those arguments were simply not applicable in his frame of reference. He blatantly did not care about any of the points that I made, and I probably wasn't making them as effectively as I could have.
Fortunately, he has no intention of going into ob-gyn. Even more importantly, he's willing to refer to another physician so long as there are doctors willing and able to prescribe or perform the appropriate services. I'll never be able to look at him the same way, though. No matter how reasonable and kind he seems when interacting with our classmates, there'll always be the little internal voice reminding me that he thinks a woman should be forced to carry to term even if it kills her.
I wonder if he'll have the opposite reservations about me, or if it just doesn't matter enough to him.
Emotions aren't a weakness. Studies have shown that without emotions we make decisions that produce more harm than good, often to ourselves; it's one of the major reasons that bad sociopaths are caught so easily. (Good sociopaths learn how to mimic emotions well enough to fool most everyone.) When somebody tells you that they don't believe you have the right control your own body, it's irrational not to react strongly. What I need to do is learn how to take a mental step back and channel the initial emotional gutpunch into a galvanizing force rather than let it throw my thoughts into disarray.
(no subject)
May. 18th, 2010 12:22 amMy relationship with the cardigan currently on the needles is getting hot and heavy, if only because I just attached the sleeves to the body and so have a giant lump of wool on my lap in the middle of summer. Said cardigan is decisively into the ugly stage, where it’s vaguely misshapen and the stitches are uneven and there are gaping holes in the armpits and loose ends everywhere and oh god why did I ever think I could knit? But a good blocking will straighten all that out.*
I’m also in the process of moving out of the dorm, which means that right now my room bears a striking resemblance to the cardigan, loose ends and all. There’s a whole lot of barely controlled chaos with a vague hint of underlying order spied among the piles of books and bed linens, and within the next couple of days I’ll pummel it into submission.
A good blocking will probably not do the trick on the room, however.
On a more introspective note, I have lots of thinky thoughts - the alchemy of knitting, noticing personal warning signs, being an introvert vs. being antisocial vs. being a hermit, interstitiality as a scientist-artist type person - but have been generally too low-energy and scatterbrained to sit down and write. Not necessarily in a negative space, just...listless and without any desire to make myself focus more than I need to knit. Possibly medical school applications on top of senior thesis on top of senior recital on top of finals left me more burned out than I thought. Which is slightly exasperating, since I don't remember ever really feeling like I was nearing my limits, but that's the best explanation I have for my current state of mostly-content immobility.
* Blocking is the magical, wonderful process whereby you gently – or in my case, overenthusiastically – encourage the fabric to take on the dimensions you want. I will never stop being delighted by the difference blocking can make for a garment. It's like watching a hat come out of a rabbit. Admittedly, I started knitting with lace, where the finished object doesn’t look like anything but a snarl of yarn until you block it, so I may be treating the process with a bit too much reverence.
I’m also in the process of moving out of the dorm, which means that right now my room bears a striking resemblance to the cardigan, loose ends and all. There’s a whole lot of barely controlled chaos with a vague hint of underlying order spied among the piles of books and bed linens, and within the next couple of days I’ll pummel it into submission.
A good blocking will probably not do the trick on the room, however.
On a more introspective note, I have lots of thinky thoughts - the alchemy of knitting, noticing personal warning signs, being an introvert vs. being antisocial vs. being a hermit, interstitiality as a scientist-artist type person - but have been generally too low-energy and scatterbrained to sit down and write. Not necessarily in a negative space, just...listless and without any desire to make myself focus more than I need to knit. Possibly medical school applications on top of senior thesis on top of senior recital on top of finals left me more burned out than I thought. Which is slightly exasperating, since I don't remember ever really feeling like I was nearing my limits, but that's the best explanation I have for my current state of mostly-content immobility.
* Blocking is the magical, wonderful process whereby you gently – or in my case, overenthusiastically – encourage the fabric to take on the dimensions you want. I will never stop being delighted by the difference blocking can make for a garment. It's like watching a hat come out of a rabbit. Admittedly, I started knitting with lace, where the finished object doesn’t look like anything but a snarl of yarn until you block it, so I may be treating the process with a bit too much reverence.
Breaking news: Sleep is good!
Apr. 4th, 2010 11:31 pmSome of my classmates can function on no sleep. They brag about all-nighters, or ruefully admit that they only got nine or so hours for the past three days total. I cannot do that. At all. I need seven to eight hours minimum to function normally. Deprive me of sleep and I end up wandering around in a daze all day feeling like I'm half-anesthetized, and it's just more efficient to lose two hours of work to get the sleep I need than to lose an entire workday because I can't string a coherent thought together above the "Fire bad. Tree pretty" level.
So for the past week Unavoidable Circumstances have made me break one of my cardinal rules and I've only been snagging half of what I need. The results have been...well. I ended dozing off repeatedly during an orchestra rehearsal while the brass were thundering Mahler loudly enough to shake the floor. This was not voluntary, this was literally being unable to keep my eyes open. Pinching myself didn't work. Trying to keep moving a bit didn't work. I kept on counting measures while sinking in and out of sleep and somehow managed to always jerk myself awake just in time to make my entrances. It ended up being a surreal sort of push-and-pull between states of consciousness. That was fun! I never want to do it again.
And after nearly a week of only getting three to five hours of sleep a night, six hours feels fantastic. I'm not staggering around all zombified! Complex concepts like "putting on pants" and "brushing teeth" no longer require extensive consideration before being enacted! A girl could get used to this.
So for the past week Unavoidable Circumstances have made me break one of my cardinal rules and I've only been snagging half of what I need. The results have been...well. I ended dozing off repeatedly during an orchestra rehearsal while the brass were thundering Mahler loudly enough to shake the floor. This was not voluntary, this was literally being unable to keep my eyes open. Pinching myself didn't work. Trying to keep moving a bit didn't work. I kept on counting measures while sinking in and out of sleep and somehow managed to always jerk myself awake just in time to make my entrances. It ended up being a surreal sort of push-and-pull between states of consciousness. That was fun! I never want to do it again.
And after nearly a week of only getting three to five hours of sleep a night, six hours feels fantastic. I'm not staggering around all zombified! Complex concepts like "putting on pants" and "brushing teeth" no longer require extensive consideration before being enacted! A girl could get used to this.
Recording for posterity
Feb. 17th, 2010 12:03 amToday? Today was awesome, for a whole passel of reasons. Today was filled with productivity and mint chocolate and orange chocolate and lace and dragons* and finally making progress on a number of stalled projects.
Now I go to sleep the sleep of the righteous who have crossed items off of their To Do list.
* Well, a dragon. I have made admiring noises at Creatures from El for years now. And due to medical school shenanigans, I (quite happily) forwent presents for the year. Only I got into the Wonderful School of Wonderfulness in Wonderville and was able to cancel around half my interviews. Each interview is easily $300 of travel, so that's a whole bunch of money saved, which is yay-worthy enough on the face of it. And then what should arrive in the mail today but a mysteeerious package all the way from Canada and it contained a dragon, my very own sparkly, twisty dragon. I may have actually flailed like a muppet, before calling my parents and doing the verbal equivalent. (At least I didn't swear.) And lookit his ears! His big bunny ears! Ladies and gentlemen, I am the proud owner of a lop dragon. I shall call him Mr. Flopsy. He should probably have a more dignified name, but it's the sort of name that once thought cannot be unthought and now he's stuck as a Mr. Flopsy.
Now I go to sleep the sleep of the righteous who have crossed items off of their To Do list.
* Well, a dragon. I have made admiring noises at Creatures from El for years now. And due to medical school shenanigans, I (quite happily) forwent presents for the year. Only I got into the Wonderful School of Wonderfulness in Wonderville and was able to cancel around half my interviews. Each interview is easily $300 of travel, so that's a whole bunch of money saved, which is yay-worthy enough on the face of it. And then what should arrive in the mail today but a mysteeerious package all the way from Canada and it contained a dragon, my very own sparkly, twisty dragon. I may have actually flailed like a muppet, before calling my parents and doing the verbal equivalent. (At least I didn't swear.) And lookit his ears! His big bunny ears! Ladies and gentlemen, I am the proud owner of a lop dragon. I shall call him Mr. Flopsy. He should probably have a more dignified name, but it's the sort of name that once thought cannot be unthought and now he's stuck as a Mr. Flopsy.
(no subject)
Nov. 22nd, 2009 09:48 amMy dreams for the past few nights have been quasi-nightmares where disaster threatens but never actually arrives. What makes tonight different was that I brought my coping mechanism in to save the day. Well, night. I was trying to defend my friends from a malevolent entity haunting a mazelike mansion or hotel. The problem was, I couldn't see it, so I ended up creeping through the rooms playing a metaphysical game of "hot or cold" with the overwhelming sense of dread that accompanied its presence. At some point I noticed the hotel's cat - a long-haired calico I've never encountered awake - hissing at something I couldn't see, so I picked it up and used it as my ghost-detector. This all came to a head with me cornered in a dark bedroom with a snarling, terrified cat in my arms and an angry spirit ready to tear me to shreds. And then I knit myself up a shield of light. Don't ask me what the yarn was made of, or where I got the needles, but I surrounded myself with a shimmery gold-rose-peach veil that the entity couldn't touch. It took concentration to maintain its existence, and I knew that my protection would disappear as soon as I faltered, so the dream turned into a struggle to keep the shield in existence while the entity attacked its boundaries. The whole mess was terrifying and deadly serious while I was in the dream, but kind of hilarious once I woke up and realized that I actually used knitting to protect myself. Considering that nowadays whenever I get too stressed about the multitude of obligations I have to fulfill and the uncertainty surrounding my future I start absently thinking about what's on the needles and planning future projects, it was interesting to see it show up to serve as a more literal shield in my dreams.
Of course then I switched to become a crewmember on a tiny spaceship running from the Big Bad Government. And they had boarded us and were going to take what they needed and then shut off our life support, leaving the crew to die horribly in the vacuum of space. I think that we had managed to contact a new race - they might have been AI, or possibly plants, but all I get when I try to remember them is an image of a fractal - and/or information on a new type of weapon, but either way the BBG wanted it and didn't want anybody else to know that they had it. Hence our planned horrible death. Only this being a dream, they just let the crew run around on the ship while they took what they needed and programed our ship to kill us, so we were all trying to find a way to stop them. Which was still pretty nightmarish, what with the looming threat of death, but at least I could see the people who wanted to kill me and be proactive about preventing it.
Of course then I switched to become a crewmember on a tiny spaceship running from the Big Bad Government. And they had boarded us and were going to take what they needed and then shut off our life support, leaving the crew to die horribly in the vacuum of space. I think that we had managed to contact a new race - they might have been AI, or possibly plants, but all I get when I try to remember them is an image of a fractal - and/or information on a new type of weapon, but either way the BBG wanted it and didn't want anybody else to know that they had it. Hence our planned horrible death. Only this being a dream, they just let the crew run around on the ship while they took what they needed and programed our ship to kill us, so we were all trying to find a way to stop them. Which was still pretty nightmarish, what with the looming threat of death, but at least I could see the people who wanted to kill me and be proactive about preventing it.
And then this happened
Oct. 25th, 2009 07:10 pmI lost the notebook that basically acts as my external memory.
That pretty much sums up my mental state of the past week.
That pretty much sums up my mental state of the past week.
So this happened
Oct. 24th, 2009 03:47 pmThe Conservatory orchestra gave a concert at a prison, which I really need to write about because it was amazing, and on the way out I got ambushed by LB, the college's president and the orchestra's conductor. Even after four, nearly five years of playing for him, his intelligence and accomplishments are still intimidating; he's a bit of a modern Renaissance man and almost every project he touches succeeds. He's not a conventionally charismatic person, but he has a perverse sort of people skills born out of his unselfconscious eccentricity, and he's a compelling orator. In any case, as we were passing through the multiple checkpoints on the way out of the prison, he mentioned in his very serious, slightly odd way that my oboe teacher had told him I was applying to medical school. I expected him to move on to another student after I'd replied in the affirmative, or to ask me how I'd found the process so far, but instead he wanted a list of the schools I was applying to. Because he's friends with the deans at most top-tier universities and wants to contact them on my behalf so he can extol my many virtues.
Well color me gobsmacked. I had no idea how to react, so I tried to be appropriately polite and grateful for the (very, very generous) offer without, you know, flailing or staring open-mouthed or anything.
Sometimes life hands you lemons. Sometimes it hands you lemonade in a diamond-encrusted carafe.
Well color me gobsmacked. I had no idea how to react, so I tried to be appropriately polite and grateful for the (very, very generous) offer without, you know, flailing or staring open-mouthed or anything.
Sometimes life hands you lemons. Sometimes it hands you lemonade in a diamond-encrusted carafe.
Ambiguous feelings
Oct. 18th, 2009 12:14 amI am starting to get interview offers. On the one hand, yay! On the other hand, I'm left with a lingering desire to hide under my covers until the scary things go away.
This being life, where hiding under the covers is a distinct non-option, I'm trying to focus on the yay part.
Forward into the breach!
This being life, where hiding under the covers is a distinct non-option, I'm trying to focus on the yay part.
Forward into the breach!
OH MY STARS, INTERNET, YOU WILL NOT EVEN BELIEVE THIS.
So I was doing more literature review for my senior project. And I found one EEG study that was fairly pertinent to my topic, but hey, why does the first author's surname look so familiar...
Remember that post a couple weeks back about Mr. Cult Leader the FYSEM professor? Raise your hand if you know where I'm going with this.
That's right, my tumultuous past is dogging me.
I said a rude word very loudly. Then I started laughing, because how else are you supposed to react to that?
This is beyond "unlikely" and into "implausible," because this guy was principally an author of literature, not a science-y person. And the article was published the year he taught my class, so it was probably submitted before he came to Bard. The second author looks like it might have been his conductor ex-wife (I TOLD YOU HE OVERSHARED), so... so...
I don't even know. I'm kind of stuck between hilarity and horror.
WELL PLAYED, UNIVERSE, WELL PLAYED INDEED.
So I was doing more literature review for my senior project. And I found one EEG study that was fairly pertinent to my topic, but hey, why does the first author's surname look so familiar...
Remember that post a couple weeks back about Mr. Cult Leader the FYSEM professor? Raise your hand if you know where I'm going with this.
That's right, my tumultuous past is dogging me.
I said a rude word very loudly. Then I started laughing, because how else are you supposed to react to that?
This is beyond "unlikely" and into "implausible," because this guy was principally an author of literature, not a science-y person. And the article was published the year he taught my class, so it was probably submitted before he came to Bard. The second author looks like it might have been his conductor ex-wife (I TOLD YOU HE OVERSHARED), so... so...
I don't even know. I'm kind of stuck between hilarity and horror.
WELL PLAYED, UNIVERSE, WELL PLAYED INDEED.
(no subject)
Aug. 21st, 2009 01:38 pmMy first year of college I fell, almost by accident, into the First Year Seminar taught by one of the most interesting people I have ever met. I have hard time articulating just what I mean by "interesting," because I've considered and discarded "pitiable" and "terrifying" as both true but not sufficient. An author with a long and checkered history of odd jobs, from tea taster to corporate shark, he had the sort of charisma that had the entire class thronging around him. He arranged for extra reading and extra meetings outside of class that went on far into the night, and nobody complained, or if they did I never noticed. He started up an e-mail group so the students in his two courses could debate, ask questions, and post those essays he judged worthy. I fell behind on reading the constant back-and-forth that flooded into my inbox pretty quickly; I had four other classes, plus the Conservatory to worry about. Instead, I saved all of the e-mails in a folder titled "The Burning Gods", promising myself I'd read them when I had time. I don't remember why I called it that, besides that I liked the phrase.
Second semester, the FYSEM schedule he offered didn't mesh with some of my mandatory courses. We kept in touch. For reasons I've never really understood, he had chosen me first semester, along with a handful of others. We were the elect, invited over to his house for debates, offered mentorship and the assurance that we were, as his oft-repeated refrain went, "brilliant." I can't speak for the others, but I had some nasty self esteem issues my first couple years. Hearing that yes, I was intelligent, I was a special, special snowflake, I had something worthwhile to offer the world, and getting that validation from a respected authority figure who cultivated the wise and farsighted aura of a guru or a cult leader was amazing. And I really cannot stress his charisma enough. In person he had the sort of magnetic pull that made everything he said seem reasonable, even when you realized it was a load of bull once you'd left his sphere of influence. I ended up talking to one of the other students who'd taken his course and came to the conclusion that it had taken us nearly a year to look back on that class with enough objectivity to say "Wow. The way he positioned us as his little disciples was kind of creepy."
Anyway. Trouble came to Paradise in the second semester. I got it all second hand, at first only from the professor, eventually from some of the students he'd alienated. He told me about the bitter divide in his class over the extra reading he'd assigned, about the vitriolic arguments that devolved in ad hominem attacks, about how shocked and upset he was over the immaturity of his 18 year old students. Oh, and about the student who confessed her love to him and how he invited her out to watch the sun rise. In retrospect, I have no idea how much was true, how much was a lie, and how much he honestly thought was true but did not correspond to reality as most people recognize it. The entire fiasco came to a peak at the end of the second year, when he posted publicly about a relationship he disapproved of between two of his elect. They split off and sent a scathing critique of his teaching style to the administration.
Yes, this is all very dramatic. We were first year college students out on our own for the first time. Rather than get drunk and party, we'd elected to get sucked into a culty tempest in a teapot. I don't know what the professor's excuse was for aiding, abetting, and instigating.
I let myself fall out of contact with him. The gaps between our e-mails grew longer, the e-mails themselves shorter and more perfunctory. With distance, I came to see the extent of his neediness, his ego and arrogance, the way he'd manipulated his students to make himself the center of his own little universe.
But I've let the two hundred e-mails in The Burning Gods lie in my inbox for the past four years, unwilling to throw them out just because I'd become disillusioned. I always intended to read them eventually, hopefully with the understanding that an extra few years of life has given me and sympathy for all of those passionate, brilliant kids talking about philosophy like they were the first ones to ever really think about it. I've glanced through a couple of them and they're about what you'd expect: full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Today I hit delete.
Second semester, the FYSEM schedule he offered didn't mesh with some of my mandatory courses. We kept in touch. For reasons I've never really understood, he had chosen me first semester, along with a handful of others. We were the elect, invited over to his house for debates, offered mentorship and the assurance that we were, as his oft-repeated refrain went, "brilliant." I can't speak for the others, but I had some nasty self esteem issues my first couple years. Hearing that yes, I was intelligent, I was a special, special snowflake, I had something worthwhile to offer the world, and getting that validation from a respected authority figure who cultivated the wise and farsighted aura of a guru or a cult leader was amazing. And I really cannot stress his charisma enough. In person he had the sort of magnetic pull that made everything he said seem reasonable, even when you realized it was a load of bull once you'd left his sphere of influence. I ended up talking to one of the other students who'd taken his course and came to the conclusion that it had taken us nearly a year to look back on that class with enough objectivity to say "Wow. The way he positioned us as his little disciples was kind of creepy."
Anyway. Trouble came to Paradise in the second semester. I got it all second hand, at first only from the professor, eventually from some of the students he'd alienated. He told me about the bitter divide in his class over the extra reading he'd assigned, about the vitriolic arguments that devolved in ad hominem attacks, about how shocked and upset he was over the immaturity of his 18 year old students. Oh, and about the student who confessed her love to him and how he invited her out to watch the sun rise. In retrospect, I have no idea how much was true, how much was a lie, and how much he honestly thought was true but did not correspond to reality as most people recognize it. The entire fiasco came to a peak at the end of the second year, when he posted publicly about a relationship he disapproved of between two of his elect. They split off and sent a scathing critique of his teaching style to the administration.
Yes, this is all very dramatic. We were first year college students out on our own for the first time. Rather than get drunk and party, we'd elected to get sucked into a culty tempest in a teapot. I don't know what the professor's excuse was for aiding, abetting, and instigating.
I let myself fall out of contact with him. The gaps between our e-mails grew longer, the e-mails themselves shorter and more perfunctory. With distance, I came to see the extent of his neediness, his ego and arrogance, the way he'd manipulated his students to make himself the center of his own little universe.
But I've let the two hundred e-mails in The Burning Gods lie in my inbox for the past four years, unwilling to throw them out just because I'd become disillusioned. I always intended to read them eventually, hopefully with the understanding that an extra few years of life has given me and sympathy for all of those passionate, brilliant kids talking about philosophy like they were the first ones to ever really think about it. I've glanced through a couple of them and they're about what you'd expect: full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Today I hit delete.
I haven't been writing down my dreams regularly, so I don't remember all the details as clearly as I should, but the one last night started off neat and then got creepy.
It was set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Fairly standard fare, from what I can remember: small enclaves and tribes of humans fending for themselves as best as they could, complete breakdown of society, everything was grungy and gritty in the best Hollywood tradition. What stands out is when I stumbled across a warehouse of ancient engines predating the breakdown. Calling it a warehouse doesn't do justice to the size of the place; it was big enough to have its own horizon, and filled entirely with rectangular blocks arrayed in orderly rows like library shelves. Dust covered everything in a thick, muffling layer, and the only light was wan and sourceless. The blocks stretched up to a ceiling so high it faded into the gloom pervading the entire place. I knew instinctively that they were engines, though dream-me seemed to think that they did things as well as powered them. Each one was covered with an intricate filigree of designs darker than the concrete-grey of their outer shells, something like a cross between complex equations and fractals, that might have served as a manual or a description of what each one did. Brightly colored graffiti covered some of the designs, signatures, enigmatic epigrams, and sometimes just swaths of color, as though the vandal had purposely tried to obscure the symbols beneath.
I wandered in the narrow corridors between the engines - I think I'd fled there to escape one of the roving gangs, since the warehouse was forbidden and/or holy territory - until I heard the sound of clanks and swearing. Following the sounds to the source led me to a tiny woman dressed in mechanic's overalls, covered in grease and dust. Her hair was cropped short and stuck up in haphazard hedgehog spikes with all of the engine oil and dirt in it. She had removed the front panel from one of the engines to reveal an intricate arrangement of gears, springs, what looked like oversized circuitboards, and and wires, which looked like the source of the clanks and the reason for her profanity. Most of it looked rusted or covered in cobwebs. She switched from glaring at it to glaring at me when I came up to ask her what she was doing.
Self-evidently, she was trying to fix the engines. She'd theorized that the wasteland had formed when they stopped doing their job, whatever it was, and she wanted to restore them and theoretically the world. I offered to help and at the sound of my voice, the machine's workings started to move. They were horribly out of repair, so they did so with much rattling and grinding, but they stopped the moment I shut up. It's hard to say who was more startled, her or me. The mechanic rounded on me irritably, feeling that I'd stolen the glory of fixing the machines from her. She'd worked on them for years and never figured out what powered them, much less made them move, and now I'd come along and gotten a reaction out of them without even knowing what I was doing. I could help her fix them, she said at last. Emphasis on 'help'.
Stuff happened, and I'm sure it must have been neat, because I woke up with the sense that I was either the reincarnated engineer who'd designed the machines, his/her descendant, or the immortal engineer myself, having wiped my memory of the past who-knows-how-long for some obscure reason. The creepy part came when I noticed the first two fingers of my left hand getting stiff and numb. This was probably because I was sleeping in a funny position, but in the dream, this continued for weeks while I worked on the engines. They grew unusable and I finally peeled the skin off my index finger. It came away painlessly, a bit like old snakeskin. Beneath it, the muscles of my finger were desiccated and half-translucent. I examined it more closely and found small insects burrowed into the pad. The dream dumped the knowledge that they were parasites into my head. They were bright orange and tear-drop shaped, with mandibles like a wolf spider and a cluster of bright black eyes. I squeezed them out. The adults were tiny - four or five of them had fit in the tip of my finger - and the grubs were little more than orange dots. They fell out of their holes easily and when I looked away and then back, the skin had regenerated and I had feeling in my index finger again. My middle finger had been growing numb more slowly than my index. Now that I knew what was causing it, I took a razorblade, braced myself, and cut into the tip. I saw a flash of orange beneath, and I squeezed. The cut wasn't quite big enough for the parasite to be pushed out. The pain wasn't terrible - the finger was mostly numb, after all - it felt a bit like lancing a blister.
I woke up before I could debug my middle finger. Strangely, neither skinning my finger nor the sight of the parasites who'd burrowed into it bothered me much in the dream. It was more of an annoyance that kept me from using that hand effectively, and after all, everything regenerated once I'd pushed the parasites out. I only started getting the heeby-jeebies once I woke up and remembered them.
This is the third horrible dream I've had where disgusting things are growing on/in/eating my flesh. Thanks, subconscious. Thanks lots.
It was set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Fairly standard fare, from what I can remember: small enclaves and tribes of humans fending for themselves as best as they could, complete breakdown of society, everything was grungy and gritty in the best Hollywood tradition. What stands out is when I stumbled across a warehouse of ancient engines predating the breakdown. Calling it a warehouse doesn't do justice to the size of the place; it was big enough to have its own horizon, and filled entirely with rectangular blocks arrayed in orderly rows like library shelves. Dust covered everything in a thick, muffling layer, and the only light was wan and sourceless. The blocks stretched up to a ceiling so high it faded into the gloom pervading the entire place. I knew instinctively that they were engines, though dream-me seemed to think that they did things as well as powered them. Each one was covered with an intricate filigree of designs darker than the concrete-grey of their outer shells, something like a cross between complex equations and fractals, that might have served as a manual or a description of what each one did. Brightly colored graffiti covered some of the designs, signatures, enigmatic epigrams, and sometimes just swaths of color, as though the vandal had purposely tried to obscure the symbols beneath.
I wandered in the narrow corridors between the engines - I think I'd fled there to escape one of the roving gangs, since the warehouse was forbidden and/or holy territory - until I heard the sound of clanks and swearing. Following the sounds to the source led me to a tiny woman dressed in mechanic's overalls, covered in grease and dust. Her hair was cropped short and stuck up in haphazard hedgehog spikes with all of the engine oil and dirt in it. She had removed the front panel from one of the engines to reveal an intricate arrangement of gears, springs, what looked like oversized circuitboards, and and wires, which looked like the source of the clanks and the reason for her profanity. Most of it looked rusted or covered in cobwebs. She switched from glaring at it to glaring at me when I came up to ask her what she was doing.
Self-evidently, she was trying to fix the engines. She'd theorized that the wasteland had formed when they stopped doing their job, whatever it was, and she wanted to restore them and theoretically the world. I offered to help and at the sound of my voice, the machine's workings started to move. They were horribly out of repair, so they did so with much rattling and grinding, but they stopped the moment I shut up. It's hard to say who was more startled, her or me. The mechanic rounded on me irritably, feeling that I'd stolen the glory of fixing the machines from her. She'd worked on them for years and never figured out what powered them, much less made them move, and now I'd come along and gotten a reaction out of them without even knowing what I was doing. I could help her fix them, she said at last. Emphasis on 'help'.
Stuff happened, and I'm sure it must have been neat, because I woke up with the sense that I was either the reincarnated engineer who'd designed the machines, his/her descendant, or the immortal engineer myself, having wiped my memory of the past who-knows-how-long for some obscure reason. The creepy part came when I noticed the first two fingers of my left hand getting stiff and numb. This was probably because I was sleeping in a funny position, but in the dream, this continued for weeks while I worked on the engines. They grew unusable and I finally peeled the skin off my index finger. It came away painlessly, a bit like old snakeskin. Beneath it, the muscles of my finger were desiccated and half-translucent. I examined it more closely and found small insects burrowed into the pad. The dream dumped the knowledge that they were parasites into my head. They were bright orange and tear-drop shaped, with mandibles like a wolf spider and a cluster of bright black eyes. I squeezed them out. The adults were tiny - four or five of them had fit in the tip of my finger - and the grubs were little more than orange dots. They fell out of their holes easily and when I looked away and then back, the skin had regenerated and I had feeling in my index finger again. My middle finger had been growing numb more slowly than my index. Now that I knew what was causing it, I took a razorblade, braced myself, and cut into the tip. I saw a flash of orange beneath, and I squeezed. The cut wasn't quite big enough for the parasite to be pushed out. The pain wasn't terrible - the finger was mostly numb, after all - it felt a bit like lancing a blister.
I woke up before I could debug my middle finger. Strangely, neither skinning my finger nor the sight of the parasites who'd burrowed into it bothered me much in the dream. It was more of an annoyance that kept me from using that hand effectively, and after all, everything regenerated once I'd pushed the parasites out. I only started getting the heeby-jeebies once I woke up and remembered them.
This is the third horrible dream I've had where disgusting things are growing on/in/eating my flesh. Thanks, subconscious. Thanks lots.
