The Lonely Opera

My weekend has been unusual.

Recently the situation with James and Adair has become more complicated. Or rather, a previously existing complication has refused to stay sublimated. Adair does not like that I visit so incessantly. She wants her time with James. We get along very well, but she began to develop a dislike for me despite herself. The solution to this situation would seem very simple. I just give them a weekend off every once in a while. But it was complicated by the fact that James insisted on my visiting as frequently as I please. He did not and does not want his relationship with Adair to interfere with my visits. Unfortunately, that is an unrealistic desire. He's bought a ring and intends to propose when circumstances allow. I let him know as much, in a delightfully homosexual metaphor, the comedic nature of which made it easier for him to take. Up the butt.

Because tensions between myself and Adair had begun to build during my last visit, due in part to my misidentification of the subject of one of her portraits as a man, when it was in fact herself, I wanted to allow the situation to settle down without delay, and opted to not visit this weekend.

On Friday I purchased a season pass to this city's premiere institution of the arts, which includes a museum, a theatre, and a symphony hall with accompanying orchestra. I walked there up the core street of the city, through Midtown, a total of seven blocks. I walked past a lot of places. A house museum, a branch of the federal reserve, apartments with an entrance flanked by granite fountains and shaded patios, and a business-executive restaurant where a film was being shot. I picked up my pass and got a ticket to Janacek's Glagolitic Mass.

I went to visit my parents. It was nice enough. We talked and went places. I gathered up all of my parents' Halloween decorations, since they won't be using them this year (My father will be in Hawaii and my mother doesn't care to set it all up herself), as well as some firewood and a portable fire pit. More on that later. Or not.

At one o-clock this morning, I noticed that the moon was shining extremely brightly, and the stars as well. It was so bright that it left an afterimage on the eye like the sun. I later learned it was a full moon, the harvest moon. It was cold outside and the air carried sound well. I could hear the planes at the airport five miles away. I went for a walk through my neighborhood barefoot. It was so quiet that I heard a cat walking. I can't tell you what it sounded like, because it was such a small noise that it had no quality or dimension to it, except that it was brief and soft. I turned to look and saw the cat, sitting there in a driveway. I crouched and held out a hand for a minute or two, making the little vague motions that we always seem to think will attract cats, and when I gave in and stood up it ran off. Further up the hill a dog in his yard noticed me and took offense at my late-night walk. He began to bark and did not stop for the remainder of the time I was outside. I know because I could hear him no matter how far away I got.

I got back in town an hour before the show. I had planned to take the trolley to the Xth Street rail station and take the train one stop up to the (X+7)th Street station next to the arts center. I was delayed by Marie telling me about hr typical party-filled weekend and then waited for the trolley before remembering it doesn't run on the weekends. I walked to the station and payed two dollars for two trips. A dollar for seven blocks. Not economical, but in this city it is not the best idea to walk those seven blocks alone at night. At the station a little mouse ran beneath my bench and sniffed at my shoe. When I moved my head to see it better it panicked and ran off. The opera was not an opera; it was a concert with a choir and four solo singers. There was also a pipe organ. It was, as the title indicated, a mass. The music did not move me. It held no meaning to me. It was decent music, to be sure, and at times moving, but it was like a different language to me. I did not understand.

On the way back I waited alone on the platform for the train to come, rode one stop, and then walked once more through the dark and very nearly empty streets back to my dormitory. It is hard for me to tell what it is like for me to walk alone at night. It is the perfect example and expression of my feeling that I am placeless, a particle set loose to drift loosely on my various paths. It was dark and quiet and lonely. It was depressing in the extreme.

When I got in my roommates were all sitting around in the dark just finishing a movie. How happy they were in their friendship. I drank a glass of tea and retired to my box to write a depressing and needlessly pseudonymous journal entry.

Depression is the worst drug.

A Windy Day

Today I got the test back; an 82 on a class average of 77. I was a little disappointed, but on the whole it is an excellent grade. The curve at this institution is steep, you see. Class was cut short and I went outside to sit and eat my lunch apple. The wind was blowing strongly, mussing my otherwise meticulous hair. On the walk back to work little flowers blew off a tree and into my face. I saw a devil dancing in the leaves.

If it must be said, as it often is, that I am the earth, then let this be known:
I do not love those whose passions burn intemperately, who allow themselves to be consumed;
Nor do I love those who fall to earth and run ever downward to sulk in pools and rage in seas;
Those whose spirits soar freely, refusing all bonds, dancing like the wind, sampling of all the offerings of life: Them I love.

Reaffirmation

It is the nature of the school I attend that we are frequently invited to bring equation sheets to tests. They are generally one or two notebook pages, and we are allowed to fill them with whatever content we wish, obviously excluding the answers to the tests. Most students obsess over their sheets, packing them with small print from margin to margin, abbreviating, outlining, and compacting to no end. My sheets generally consist of a few spaced lines of equations taking up one quarter of the page, which if similarly compacted would scarcely occupy a tenth of the sheet. It was so equipped that I approached a test today.

It is a frequent complaint of my classmates of every major that our school demands of us unusually heavy studying. Not so for I. This last weekend I spent high virtually every day. The test I spared no mind whatsoever as I enjoyed some films by Miyazaki and others. My preparations were only to create my cheat sheet and to skim tests from previous semesters, both of which I did entirely in the hour immediately preceding the test itself. I believe I also consulted one page of my notes. On the way to the test I ate an apple; lunch. Lately I have replaced lunch with a fruit. It takes less time to prepare and doesn't bog me down during the day. It appeals to my sense of traveling light and of culinary asceticism.

Allow me to tell you at length about how I take tests. This may be of interest to those of you who are not so skilled at this art, as I consider myself a master of it, and I have numerous scores to agree with me. It is in large part my fortune to be born into a society that ranks us by tests that is responsible for my intelligence. Just as you can only be told so many times that you are stupid before you begin to believe it, from a young age I heard constantly of my amazing intelligence, and while this bred in me great arrogance, it also ensured that I would never, in those early years, doubt myself. That was to come later.

The greatest flaw of a test is that it must be written by a person with an understanding of the material, and the very material about which it questions, which it must therefore reveal to some degree. The most obvious of these flaws are inexcusable. For example: #21) Which of the following did Politician X establish during his career?, followed by #47) The most notable effect of the passage of the Placeholder Act of 314 under Politician X was _____. Anyone with a short-term memory and the patience to review their work can capitalize on these giveaways. But this is so crude that it hardly conveys my meaning. There are more subtle hints that accrue across a test. Internal consistency is a powerful tool. One answer often leads naturally to another. This is only more true in engineering. What I do is so much more than the recitation of tired facts or the brute application of equations. I build castles in the sky. Begrudgingly given stones I stack until I scrape the clouds. I derive, friends! I derived very nearly the entirety of the material, because memorization is for chumps. These sciences are so shallow and clear.

Let me take it down a notch. I am full of triumph and find it difficult to express myself calmly. In short, I found the lectures and notes to be of little help and conquered the subject using only the information given in the problems, a scrap of notes and my own intelligence. It was deliberate and methodical and resulted in a test which I am confident I scored well on. The exhilaration of success lies in knowing that these hoops through which I am asked to jump are nothing to me.

What confidence I once had has faded with the years. To have it again is a good feeling.