sigh… i miss my old neighborhood (and more).
by krisis
We are spiders, though only showing half of our limbs to the casual viewer. Yes, we have just four to walk stairs and climb ladders with, but there are others — for social ascent, occupational strides, and hanging on to love, maybe, though they could be for anything else.
We are spiders, and we trail a single string of us, our history and opinions and experiences, and as we turn in circle upon circle we leave behind a complex web of people and places that are bound to us.
We are spiders, and things get caught in our lives. Stuck in our web, they flail madly and desperately to escape, but wind up inexorably tied to all of our people and places as they thrash, leaving our once-perfect display of natural geometry in a tangle of bent angles and broken connections.
We are spiders, and our webs are not permanent structures. They can be elaborately expanded upon, or casually discarded, leaving us with just that single string of thread to create anew.
We are spiders, spending our whole lives weaving and catching and crawling and expanding, but sometimes the old web seems in such a state of disrepair that we should take our single thread and start again, keeping some elements but eschewing the rest, leaving our old structures to decay on the branches we hung them upon.
We are spiders, and I am arachnophobic.
I just got back a midterm marked: No complaints – a solid effort. The comment is nice enough, but it doesn’t seem to match up with a 48/50 grade. Maybe if he had used an exclamation point…
As i walked from class, preoccupied with mentally arguing over the .4 i had lost on an earlier question on Security Dilemma, i stopped for a moment to consider who i would say that to. Certainly not someone who did a nearly perfect job, that’s for sure. It’s the sort of thing i would say to an anonymous member of upper management who managed to make conversation about Drexel or the Eagles or my guitar or some other nonsense with me for an entire elevator ride up to my department on 35 … “No complaints, sir, that was a solid effort.” It’s the kind of thing i say about decent lasagna made by non-Italians, or about opening acts who i have no intention of hearing again. It usually does not accompany a 96% approval rating — more like a 88%, or maybe even a 79%. I would have been perfectly happy with “solid effort” and an 88%, or with my 96% and “Outstanding job – you should expand upon this topic in your paper.” But what i’ve got leaves me feeling … eh.
What the hell am i going to be a stark raving perfectionism about after i’m done with this nonsense in (checks watch) seven and a half months?
I see those forward-leaning boys and think of high school, of tiny boys with overfull backpacks trying desperately to counter the weight. The boys i pass here at Drexel are the same as those younger ones; though they may have left their bags behind, they have not left behind that forward slouch — now leaning into the wind of their academic challenges as if it is still tangibly forcing them backwards.
Scott Andrew’s new record Where I’ve Been just arrived in my admissions mailbox! It looks and sounds great — i am floored by the idea that i am on my way to achieving similar results on my own computer (if only i could learn the secrets of his fucking amazing drum tracks). Way to finally knock the Rufus disc out of my cd player, Scott.