Evening

My dad is contemplating to go for the Cambridge summer course, since he's eligible to take up the course (some english proficiency test thingy. Thingy. Thangy. Thingy. I think 'thingy' is such a flexible and multi-purpose word.)

OK, never mind, he says it's too expensive.

A pause. Now he's saying that it's not very expensive, afterall.

Inevitably, people will start marvelling at the suites in Cambridge. (Harvey Court B&B's only 660 punds for ten days, he proclaims.)

He makes a value-judgement: it may be expensive but it's a very good experience.

But we wouldn't be able to go with you, my mum says. Realization! Enlightenment!

"It's like paying $5,000 to study." If one equates studying as something intangible and extremely rewarding, $5,000 is probably just an insignificant amount in the process of learning. Literary workshops, evening poetry readings, Shakespeare studies I muse, obviously the air of intelligence and deep, mature levels of thoght and analysis are experiences that one cannot find growing on the random bougainvillea shrubbery; then there can never be a price tag attached to such treasures.

Switch off the air-con, he says, I'm saving up to go to Europe in July. A distant glimmer on a foggy sea at dawn; probably part of a picturesque scene, a common experience for the rest of the literary ilk.
So, if this is the level of exposure and thirst for the pursuit of one's interests that RI students, albeit old, old, old alumni, inculcate, then I say dammit, I've probably wasted a significant portion of my life tricking myself into self-deluded half-hearted activities that I have been forced upon with.