I don’t feel like any of that said what i intended to say, but i have to write a short story in the next twenty minutes, so you’ll just have to stew for a while.
by krisis
Our trolley stop was smack in the middle of the Boston University campus. As we got on the car and slowly excused ourselves towards the back the conductor came on over the loudspeak in his accent and said “You all need to move towards the back. The NorthEastern students never seem to have a problem with this.” Everyone chuckled, and a few people actually moved and then the trolley was moving and then life was moving.
I meant to go to BU. It was too expensive and far away but i didn’t really care; it was probably the one educated choice i made in the entire college application process. At some point on Monday Rabi and i were crossing a street and she said it was sortof funny that i was here in Boston with her because i meant to go to college there within a five minute walk from her house. I didn’t think it was too funny, though, because i’m not sure that i would have ever met Rabi if i had actually packed my bags and headed out to a college outside of my own state. Joining blogger was the culmination of a chain of events that included shifts in content of my own website and my addictedness to Shafted, and i can’t necessarily say that it would have happened if i was anywhere else but here. Having my own blog was a response to boredom, and a response to needing somewhere to write, and a response with dissatisfaction with Shafted. Furthermore, i only kept at blogging because of the instant gratification of appearing on Power Bloggers and the audience that it slowly attracted. In fact, i never actually found Rabi through searching for other bloggers in the area, but by reading through all of the blogs on PB on one lonely night when she was on the list.
The labyrinth of life can be amusing. Sometimes you can wind up with the same outcome no matter which turn you make, whether that outcome be having a certain friends or spiraling into a deep depression. Other things are so rare that you might have missed them had you taken the long way home from class… a car accident or meeting your future wife. Rabi seemed to think that all those twists and turns would have lead us to each other eventually anyway, but i feel the exact opposite; we would have existed in the same universe, but i don’t know that our paths would have ever crossed.
I still like Boston, and i still almost wish i wound up at BU, but sometimes i reckognize that more things make a dent on your life than just the school you go to and the city you live in. And, those dings and scratches can really add up.
While i rampantly kvetch, whine, and moan about some aspects of the blogging community and its audience, i often forget that i am a member of many subsets of said community. One of those is being Drexel Blogger, and seeing as we are a sparsely populated group i am often the easiest to find. I began to rebut the Noisy Boy of last post about journaling as a communicative act in the middle of the hallway outside our classroom and when i brought up my involvement with the community he said “yeah, i know.” As it turned out, though he didn’t necessarily bring the topic up to bother me he was fully aware that i might have something to say about it seeing as it directly applied to me.
Rabi and I were talking about popularity and how it lends itself to affecting our real life, and she mentioned that she clears her history on public computers at school so no one stumbles onto Wockerjabby, yet she still finds it in the history of a lot of computers. I’ve never done any such thing — i figured that hardly anyone just randomly stalks the history of their public laptop and if they do i could easily win myself a new reader. Lately i’ve checked out a wide array of our Creese Center laptops, and almost all of them quick-completed my address before i could finish typing it. I didn’t think anything of it at the time…
There’s a boy in Models and Theories of Communication whose class participation features an unusually high signal to noise ratio. It’s something i expect, to an extent; everyone is tempted to talk about themselves and how our latest theory applies to them and their father, girlfriend, or pet hamster. In this particular case, at first i was convinced that there was a point or intention — the source of this noise is extremely well read, multilingual, and studious. However, in class those well aimed shots of his hands up into the air always wind up with me taking a deep breath and shooting one up in return because he seems to be missing the point, or obviously hasn’t done the reading, or is being wholly irrelevant.
Tonight we were talking about Berger’s Theory of Uncertainty Reduction as it pertains to interpersonal relationships, the number two axiom of which has to do with affilial physical behaviour and how it relates to how certain you are about someone (how well you know/understand them). Suddenly in my peripheral vision up goes a hand to me left, and it’s all i can do not to brace with a deep breath and a sideways glance to Jeff. Then comes the noise… what about people who develop their relationships online? A valid circumstance, to be sure, and an interesting debate to be had, but nothing that we really need to touch upon in the span of our three hour lecture. To even ask the question seemed highly noisy… obviously online relationships subscribe to a different communicative paradigm, and to try to apply them to many of our theories would require massive restructuring whenever they mention tone or physicality. I personally think if you step away from being argumentative with the interpersonal theories that they apply well to many of the relationships i’ve formed since i began this page, but the noisy boy had his own agenda and he was pressing forward with it as i seethed next to Jeff.
“What about people that keep open online journals? What is the explanation of how they fit into this scheme?” Of course, i had my hand raised and a sentence ready to fire about how journaling is really not an intentionally reciprocal communicative act so much as it is a journalistic one unless we are explicitly examining the interactions of a journaler with a peer. Before any of that could could get fired off, it was time for mid-period break, and i hauled Jeff out into the hallway with me to kvetch.
I was just getting to railing about how irrelevant blogging was to Berger and how i certainly knew better about that than some random classmate might when Noisy walks up to our conversation. I am not shy, and so i quickly point out his signal to noise ratio, and when he plays dumb about it i brought up my peeve only to find that his noise might have been a little more direct than i had initially thought.
It is eight o’clock on a Tuesday morning, which is a solid hour and a half earlier than i’ve gotten up on this day of the week so far this term. People were already up, about, and trickling out of Rabi‘s house as their day begins, and we’re just sitting here — her because her day hasn’t got any sort of structure or schedule other than making it onto a plane and me because i’ve totally subverted the ebb and flow of my entire week. I woke up long before nine in the morning yesterday and the day before; starting at 6:45 and waking up roughly every three quarters of an hour from there until nine, because that’s the way my alarm at the apartment works. Today i only got one chance at sliding back under the cover of sleep, and then i braced myself for the bright light of the kitchen and popped out of my room into the Whitaker’s morning routine.
You have to understand that i’ve only ever lived in a house with myself and my mother as a kid, and that back when she oversaw my mornings at all she was usually involved her own daily rush to work at the hospital. Somewhere in there i’m sure there was a “make sure you have your homework” and “did you get your shoes on,” but most of what i remember about mornings is from other people’s houses — my grandmother’s, and Eddy’s, and George’s — all of whom were layovers on my daily commute to CTCA or Masterman. Eventually i was old enough to take public transportation and much more reliable about waking up than my mother or her alarm clock and my routine became totally divorced from her own, barely even intersecting at the shower or the kitchen table. But, anyway, that’s not the point.
I suppose the point is that i was right, and this was really exactly the vacation that i needed. Boston isn’t anywhere exotic, and my time here was even more scheduled and routine in a lot of ways than my daily classroom engagements. However, inserting myself into this alien routine in this different place has somehow recentered me back to the things i should be really caring about instead of whatever i had on my head last week, and that’s more invaluable than anything some tropical location could possibly provide.
Well, plus there was vegan chocolate couscous pie waiting for us when we got back from the concert. That would never happen at home.