My 551st Post
If there is an ideal time and location, which allows a writer to fully pay tribute to his art; then I feel at this moment, this place I have found mine.
The summer of '06, only mid-way thru, is provin' to be a strange one. The unbridled freedom of an individual is a most intoxicating drug; that out of my environment I am finally in my element.
Hollywood teen flix sell college as sexually primed alpha youths flinging at one another in complete freedom and abandon but instead I find the opposite. I feel as I sit perched in Cabot House, Harvard's Quad, that college life is essentially limbo; neither child or adult, the student is to endure the intellectual strait-jacket and earthy pleasures for so many years until society so deems it fit that he be graduated with a diploma and welcome to join life. It is the antithesis of freedom, this enforced extended somatic adolescence..
Academia is a bubble, a break from reality; exams at the end of May followed by summer break instead life is a daily exam, where the pressure to perform is constant and the drive to excel consistent. It seems catapulting oneself to one brand or one Ivy from another is a good way of provin' one's ability but in the end money and the ability to make money (or make success however you define it) is quite unrelated to your past achievements but to capitalising on the winds of changes and the shifting sands of circumstance.
I feel so grateful that corporate life and drive has hardened me to the extent that my dorm room is the cleanest one in the 300 or so in Cabot House and that my facebook profile has mushroomed into a fully fledged and mature network in a matter of a month. Trite and trivial perhaps but I leave nothing undone and no task incomplete, a contrast to my fellow free and liberated students whose rooms are caged in their filth.
Tonight though is a different night; my living room and space have been invaded. My ideal space and ideal moment is being perched against the window corner typing away furiously lit by the first specks of dawn and listening to my house guest's Daneel's eclectic music blaring from his laptop. My house guest, retiring from the Harvard summer to visit his sister's Bat Mitzvah in Paraguay, apparently can't sleep without the music level modulated to a precise decibel, which happens to be the precise decibel that annoys the hell out of me and the general student population of I entryway Cabot. I imagine my proctor, who happens to be my neighbour, is still reeling from last night where my roomate started erm "riding" my fan while my guest belting out a Spanish pop song at 6am. As Cabot House's motto goes "gotta love Harvard nights"..
But more than that I realise that for me at least that the more things change the more they stay the same; already my house is full. I'm perched against the corner sapping up the morning dew because a de facto slumber party is happening at mine; a friend dozed off in my bed, another is scrunched up in a sleeping bag somewhere about and the house guest has occupied the place of honour with his matress bang in the middle of my living room. I, woe to me, am resting on my towel; slightly uncomfortable but grateful that three thousand miles from home I'm home.. |
