image

It's raining. And right when I was about to complain about the rheumy cold weather, I read my newsfeed on Facebook and see comments like "It's minus one thousand degrees here" — which is a nice, if not timely, observation of the subjectivity and singularity of people's experiences. 

It has occurred to me that I am no longer in school. Yes, I am a pretty slow adapter. I'm not sure how any normal person (read: JC-educated, mind-numbingly middle class, post-adolescent) can approach NS in a way that doesn't profoundly change their paradigms about life and the world. It's not really work, and it's not really school. It's a fuzzy limbo, a jarring mix of "education" and "service", and it does not come close to the "service learning" we undertake (with disinterest) back in school. We encounter superiors who are occasionally wonderful but mostly incompetent in some major, complex way; the hours are elastic: periods of mindless energy give way to a flaccid, slouching-in-the-chair-with-despair idleness; instructions are confusing, pointless, and could have come from a camel with a typewriter for all we know. Yet there is a degree of sheltering involved, in that we aren't drawing a salary, we are coerced into this and therefore are not at fault for being bratty while we still can. 

Conversely, nothing much has changed between school and this... whatever this is. Mornings are still spent on the train with my train-pals, Fat Guy Who Hogs The Width Of The Train Door, Japanese Youtube Cooking Host-Lookalike, and Person Who Probably Walked To The Station Still Asleep. I spend the day looking busy and stressed (oh, why? Because I think it's very chic.) (No.) and sometimes people bitch about other people to me, revealing more about their own insecurities and prejudices than the supposed flaws of others. Sometimes I bring tea along and read a book (while listening to them bitch.) 

And what is the future but that proverbial shroud of obscure mist covering the obscure horizon (subverted my own Wallace Stevens reference, y'all), with all the tangibility of words with no referents, or words with so many referents they become essentially meaningless.