school and x-files [x-posted from blogspot]
In the midst of all the madness, I never really got a chance to talk about life in general after the summer ended. Of course, at Tech one is introduced early on to the notion that life is work and work is life, as much as people who have the luxury to do so would like to insist otherwise, and so work will be the theme of this post. I must add, it's really not quite as hopeless as it sounds. My rebellious spirit has been quelled, to be sure, but I have rather warmed to the notion that life and work are one and the same, thus fulfilling FIITJEE's terrible prophecy when they said, "Success is 1% inspiration and 99% aspiration," or alternatively, "He who aspires will soon expire." I'm in a few interesting classes this semester, including Computer Networks, Real-Time and Embedded Systems, and Machine Learning for Trading. Some more than others, anyway. Gosh, I wish I still had it in me to expatiate at length on my classes, as I did in the tenth grade, when the act had a weird charm of its own. Back then my life consisted of a harmonious coexistence of studies, Slam Dunk, and family - a wonderful self-contained universe. Now, with career fairs looming overhead, the feeling of being the protagonist of my own life story is no longer there.
Oh, what the hell. The embedded systems professor is really down to earth for an academic. So down to earth, in fact, that his ankles could be said to be six inches underground. He has little patience for theory, and his strength lies in his enormous capacity to reduce everything to a lecture on how students can make the most of their time at Tech. I confess I haven't been paying attention. The networks professor, on the other hand, is an extremely urbane individual. He is as old as Tech itself and decants his vast stores of knowledge in small doses in every class. On his webpage you will find a list of books he likes recommending to people, and his urbanity is evident in the fact that there are several French titles among the no-less-noteworthy English ones. He's not even French: He's Egyptian. Anyone even passably familiar with life knows that a non-French person who speaks French becomes infinitely more urbane for that reason. The same cannot, alas, be said of a French person who speaks French.
I've been binging on The X-Files a lately. At one point I discovered that there was great potential in introducing X-Files-style conspiracies into the FIITJEE universe, and that has helped keep me ahead of my FIITJEE quota for the year 2016. I started watching The X-Files (forgive me if I don't conform to any well-accepted style guidelines) in sophomore year but abandoned it in the middle of the first season for reasons I no longer remember. I picked it up again this year in the middle of an episode and was delighted to discover that I remembered everything that had happened up until that point. It's not often that one is able to say that of a book or a TV series. Take for instance the Bartaemius Trilogy (Sequence?). I tried reading The Amulet of Samarkand several times, each time starting at the very beginning on account of not remembering anything that had taken place before the point at which I had last abandoned it, and eventually abandoned the book for good. It's a sterling book - far better, I thought, than Christopher Paolini's attempts to practice for the SATs -, but I just couldn't keep going in that fashion. The X-Files is not like that. It's not a perfect series by any means, but its capacity to entertain is unbounded. (Disclaimer: This only applies to seasons 1-7. Season 8 is like a host who passive-aggressively signals to you that it's time for you to leave toward the end of a party.)
Contrary to many fans of the show I like Scully a lot better than Mulder. Yes, it can get annoying sometimes, when even after two hundred episodes Scully treats Mulder's ideas with scorn, but I am still more sympathetic to Scully than to Mulder. For one thing Mulder is not all up there. He's a loon who believes that just because he's seen some paranormal things in his time every suggestion of the paranormal must be true. He's also got this monomaniacal fixation with the "Truth". That's fine, if you're a Zen Buddhist, but a little vague if you're an FBI agent who thinks "Truth" refers to the idea that life exists elsewhere in the universe. A bit all-encompassing, don't you think? Especially if you think this diet version of the "Truth" is sufficient to answer every question that has ever been asked. But that happens to be the driving force behind the show, and I don't have any objections to it per se. My primary objections are to the forces that drive Mulder himself. Mulder is what he is today because of the abduction of his sister when he was twelve. You can be so close to your sister that your parents start thinking something's up, but I have a hard time believing you could be so traumatized by her abduction early in your childhood that your entire existence would one day come to be defined by that event. Memories fade, wounds heal. Even if you're a born basket case like Mulder. But that's not the impression you get when you see Mulder foaming at the mouth over childhood simulacra of his frankly rather boring sister episode after episode, curling into the fetal position in Scully's lap while she strokes his head as if he was her goddamned cat. You get tired of Mulder's sob story after a while and cease weeping with him after the twentieth time it's brought up, and you find your sympathies aligning more and more with Scully as you yawn and glance down at your wristwatch with her while Mulder continues sobbing in the background.
In other news I finished my arrangement of Rachmaninoff's D Minor Symphony for the organ last night. Well, early this morning, in fact. I considered posting it on Facebook in my elation, but I quickly realized that it might be interpreted by my friends as the senseless spasms of a stroke victim at the computer, and I would have to explain to them why I was making an arrangement of a symphony in the first place and why I was arranging it for the pipe organ, of all instruments.