Archive for April, 2011
Strange Days
It’s really an odd feeling going into the (technically) last week of my undergraduate life. As I’ve been writing in some thank-you cards, I am not quite a believer in new chapters, distinct phases, and all that jazz. Nevertheless, it does feel something momentous can be found within these last few days, or at least something important. I don’t subscribe either to any great sentimentalism or sense of nostalgia, but there is an element of those things to be found as I go about thanking the people I am indebted to, and also as I try to reinterpret and reframe these past four years, to renew my understanding of them as it were.
It’s been especially rough, but I guess you always think so. These past years have also been remarkably transformative, and I look back at it, often saying: Who would have thought?
To run into the territory of cliché, most things seem far less predictable, and even far less normal in light of the last dozen hundred days. In a literal sense, it’s nothing in the realm of a David Lynch movie, but there are concordances and motifs at work that make it an apt comparison. I find myself emerging perhaps not any wiser, not any cleverer, not any better by any conventional metric, but certainly more in touch with my fears, the general senselessness of living, and the wonderful strangeness of being. That is, I don’t necessarily feel like any better of a person–I’m not sure if there’s any real way to measure that–but I feel different, and maybe in this post-modernist (post-post-modernist?) world, that’s as much as we can hope for.
At the end of these four years, I have no idea where exactly I’m going. I mean, sure I do have plans, and I do have a sense of direction, as they put it, but there’s also a definite sense of unpredictability that I’ve denied for a lot of my life. Look at it this way: I went into this course with the idea that I would complete it and emerge with my degree and various other technical details; that was the plan; that wasn’t simply all I got; in a way, that doesn’t even nearly begin to describe the past four years. So I’m keen. With a nose for adventure and a heart for new surprises, I’ll be more than glad to see what else–that is, on top of the said plans and directions–the next four years have in store for me.
I don’t want this to collapse into a sentimental mess, so I leave you with one of my favourite quotations as I propose a toast to these strange days past, and the stranger ones to come.
“There are worlds out there where the sky is burning, and the sea’s asleep, and the rivers dream; people made of smoke and cities made of song. Somewhere there’s danger, somewhere there’s injustice, somewhere else the tea’s getting cold. Come on, Ace. We’ve got work to do.”
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