Masked in ascension
Holiday greetings from Canada, everyone. This, my nineteenth Halloween, is but the third for which I have been without costume. I blame the limited wardrobe I transported with me to my dormitory, the midterm I had to take today, and my waning sense of creativity.
Yes indeed, I had a midterm on Halloween night. What great witch of a professor would do this, I am not certain, and in fact I believe my professor to be exactly opposite a witch, as a witch would care to have the day off to celebrate. No, rather I attribute the scheduling to an act of spite by a foreign professor who hadn't the pleasure of herself engaging in Halloween festivities in her home country. Which country this is, I cannot be certain, for though her accent seems French, her name does not.
So the day was spent primarily in studying, an act I am not much acquainted with, having not had to do so very much in high school. It's a rather monotonous task, I've found, and I do not recommend it unless you are of the sort which subjects oneself to periodic atonement. You may ask, then, if studying is what I was doing on Sunday, when I should have been updating this thing. No, in fact, I was not studying. Sunday was a day of few accompishments, in fact. While I write this primarily for the entertainment of anyone who may stumble across this, Sunday was a day of my own entertainment, my general motivation being instead to watch clips from classic All That episodes. Time well spent, perhaps, but hardly inspirational to my writing, at least not beyond the end of this paragraph.
Various parties in the spirit of Halloween have been going on for the last week or so, and though I have heard of none, it would only make sense for them to be continuing today. I have gone to none, mainly in the absence of a costume, also because I've been feeling less like spending money on anything whenever possible.
Moose: Hello? It's open.
There was a knock at the door, and as whoever it was apparently could not hear my invitation to enter, I went to the door and opened it.
Tobin: Moose! I love you!
Moose: What in tarnation!
Tarnation, indeed. I was greeted by a friend I knew from multiple sessions of last-minute math homework, dressed in clothes that would falsely indicate his being of the female gender, who threw himself around me in a hug and kissed me on the cheek. The strong scent of alcohol on his breath fit with the fact that I appeared to be all that kept him from falling over.
Tobin: Aren't you two coming out tonight? Hah… I am so drunk!
Moose: We couldn’t tell. And I'm not going anywhere tonight, I haven't a costume nor the proper state of mind, apparently, if I'm to keep up with you.
Tobin: Fine. I hear my group calling me, I have to go.
Moose: Have a good night.
So I missed the party which apparently placed McGill among the top ten party schools in North America. Let it be known that, as I did not know that we placed so high until very recently, that was by no means any factor in my deciding to come here. In fact, I was expecting quite the opposite, as academically McGill consistently ranks the top in Canada. Which wasn't a factor in my deciding to come here either, I'm here because my math teacher last year advised me to do so, he being a man I aspire to be exactly like in the future.
But the truth remains, that if it is what you desire, there are all sorts of chemicals to be placed into the body to be found around here. I'm hoping that my lack of participation will improve my class standing. Which isn't tremendously difficult, as the most common form of these chemicals, beer, I find to be quite distasteful, and only accept if given at no cost.
Tiff-Annie: They have done tests, and about nine times out of ten, drunkenness is nothing more than a placebo effect. The whole concept seems so primitive.
So there, I'd rather not pay to fool myself into believing that I have fewer inhibitions. Knowing the true meaning of the value in my bank account and that it isn't getting any larger any time soon has made me quite good at avoiding the unnecessary and picking up on free items. My father said I'd learn the value of money yet, and with it regret my decision against a free education from living at home, but I'm still not in any great rush to go back there. Might make for a nice place to visit, though. One must balance the value of money with appreciation of quality: at least, that's the delusion I am still under.
My father has a best friend who he claims is the thriftiest person he knows. This friend of his apparently had plans to publish a book on how to live on less than three thousand dollars per year. I imagine that such a book would be difficult to get a publisher to take, however, as its target demographic is not the type to be spending much of any money on books. He lives through winter in a heavy jacket inside his house, keeping the energy costs to a minimum by turning the heat off whenever possible. He has also never married, and at his age, perhaps never will, though it's not for lack of trying. It seems his minimalist way of life prevents him from meeting others willing to share this minimalist way of life, as it is a way of life not conducive to meeting a great number of people.
Jim: I am the first person he comes to when he wants advice on anything. My friends all trust me, and let me help them, and you won't speak to me.
My father is this man's confidant, and prides himself on that. He refuses to admit, however, that his relationship to me is tremendously different from that between him and his friends. He treated me like a friend, but my idea of a friend at age three was not very developed, so by the time I knew what a true friend was, it wasn't my father.
He took it back, once. Just once, he talked of his friendship to me exclusively in the past tense, indicating as though it were no longer. Then he took back his taking back. Because our relationship isn't a friendship, really. It's neither more or less, it's simply separate.
They say parenting is a greatly rewarding but greatly harrowing task. I should think, however, that childing is just as much of a burden for the child as parenting is to the parent. As children we have everything to learn from nothing, and expectations to meet that are all the worse because we will be accepted even if we don't meet them, because we know then that we won't deserve it. We are expected to know things from experiences we haven't had. We should be able to identify with sets of abstract concepts that makes the human consciousness specific to this planet, things set down centuries ago that were passed down the generations like a twisted form of the telephone game.
For those of you unfamiliar with the telephone game, I preface this explanation by saying that it is neither entertaining nor rewarding to play this game. I recommend it only for situations where you will be able to use it to demonstrate your intellectual superiority over a group of other participants. The telephone game involves a circle of participants, one of whom begins by coming up with a phrase. This phrase is whispered by the first person to the second person, who whispers what he hears to the next person, and so on until it reaches the end. The goal, in a sense, is to transmit the origianl message around the circle. In theory this will generate an amusing garbled version of the original phrase. In practice, the outcome is always either the original phrase intact, in which case the group engages in a simultaneous display of feigned excitement, the word 'operator', in cases where a stupid rule is employed where one may say 'operator' to the person before them to hear the phrase repeated, an insult, placed by some sneaky fellow who wants their opinion of a neighbour announced to the group, or a set of nonsense syllables which are found entertaining by only those under the mental age of four. In any case, it is much more amusing from a mindset that you are above the game, especially when everyone else becomes upset that they were not able to successfully transmit the message.
Jim: According to the government, you're an adult now. But psychology breaks it into more stages - until you are twenty-five, you are a 'young adult'.
Such an inspired name for a category, and yet it does not seem to properly identify with what exactly it is that distinguishes us, other than age. I feel free of certain things, such as the need to report every detail of my life to my parents, which this may be the result of. I feel different in ways I cannot properly describe yet. The previous stages of my life feel decidedly over, which more or less failed to happen when I turned from age nine to age ten, or advanced a level of public schooling. And as I've recounted them here, I suppose that's a good thing. Then again, perhaps I try to look at things too much in terms of good and evil. If I simply accepted that things are more often, I'd be a lot less stressed over things. But then, who's to say that me being less stressed is good? In the large scale of things, I don't really think it matters all so much.
-----
There once was a family which had just increased its number from a family of two to a family of three. The married couple had just been granted a newborn son, whom they immediately fit in the finest of cotton shirts and concrete pants. The inflexible pants provided the boy with a great protection to his lower limbs, and improved his balance such that he was able to walk by the age of seven months, and more than likely had the strongest thighs of any seven-month old one was likely to meet. By contrast, the concrete pants prevented him from using his knees to any extent, such that, when at age three he was given standard legwear for the first time, he did not use his knees at all. This was no matter, though, for he had learned to get along just fine without the use of his knees, and wasn't about to be dependent on them when suddenly they became available for his use.
The boy went through his young childhood ridiculed for his awkward gait and reliance on elevators, but in time trained his stiff legs for use in his own style of martial arts, as though he wielded two clubs by his torso, and was thus able to silence any chortling with a kick to the face. He excelled in his classes and made many good friends, and came to think of his difference as hardly being there at all.
As it would happen in this society, when each child turned the age of eleven, there was a great coming of age ceremony wherein the child scaled a mountain of stairs to the council of elders, who would decide each child's occupation for the remainder of his or her life. This troubled the boy immensely, who had never climbed a stair in his life, much less a mountain of them.
'Father, what should I do?' he asked one day. 'I haven't learned the use of my knees as everyone else has, and I fear I shall never be able to climb a set of stairs!'
'Calm down, my boy,' said his father. 'We will deal with that when the time comes. And if, when the time comes, you cannot climb the stairs, you may stay here with us, and we will gladly provide for you.'
'Mother, what should I do?' he then asked, unsatisfied with his first answer. 'My legs are useless for climbing stairs, and if I cannot climb stairs, I can't see how I should ever find my destiny!'
'Calm down, son,' said his mother. 'There are many a fine opportunities for a lad such as yourself who cannot climb the stairs to the council of elders. You could sing songs on street corners, wash windows, even kick people senseless with those martial arts skills of yours and take their possessions!'
But still the boy was not satisfied. It seemed as though his parents had already written off the possibility of him reaching the council at the top of the mountain of stairs. Almost as if that is what they had planned for.
There were three weeks before he was to turn eleven years of age. He spent every day at the fire escape behind an apartment complex, trying incessantly to conquer the stairs that seemed to him like teeth grinning at him from a menacing smile. 'Wait,' he thought. 'Teeth. That's precisely it.'
It was the day marking eleven years since the boy was born. All his family and friends gathered around the base of the mountain of stairs to commence the ceremony.
'Neil Thomas Hutchinson,' said the village's mayor, 'you come before us to transition from childhood to late childhood. Are you prepared to do so?'
'Yes, sir,' said the boy.
'Then you know what you must do.'
So the boy squared off in front of the stairs. And he let himself fall forward onto them, in such a lifeless motion that the crowd gasped and leaned toward him, held back from assisting him only by the mayor's insistence that they let the boy be for at least a few minutes. The boy reached forward and grabbed the highest stair he could, and pulled himself upward. He then opened his mouth and bit down on the stair in front of his face, freeing his hands to reach yet higher and pull him slowly toward his goal. He bit down again, three stairs higher. He was moving. He was ascending the mountain of stairs.
Hours passed, and the sun began to set as he was reaching the top of the mountain. The crowd below had dispersed except for the boy's parents, who watched their son perform this incredulous act in horror of what he was doing to himself, and in greater fear that he would make it and abandon them forever. And at last he had made it.
At the top of the mountain, he rolled over and kicked the ground forcefully to flip himself over and right himself again. 'Elders,' he said, 'I present myself to you.' As he bowed, one rose and pointed at him.
'Dentist.'
Yes indeed, I had a midterm on Halloween night. What great witch of a professor would do this, I am not certain, and in fact I believe my professor to be exactly opposite a witch, as a witch would care to have the day off to celebrate. No, rather I attribute the scheduling to an act of spite by a foreign professor who hadn't the pleasure of herself engaging in Halloween festivities in her home country. Which country this is, I cannot be certain, for though her accent seems French, her name does not.
So the day was spent primarily in studying, an act I am not much acquainted with, having not had to do so very much in high school. It's a rather monotonous task, I've found, and I do not recommend it unless you are of the sort which subjects oneself to periodic atonement. You may ask, then, if studying is what I was doing on Sunday, when I should have been updating this thing. No, in fact, I was not studying. Sunday was a day of few accompishments, in fact. While I write this primarily for the entertainment of anyone who may stumble across this, Sunday was a day of my own entertainment, my general motivation being instead to watch clips from classic All That episodes. Time well spent, perhaps, but hardly inspirational to my writing, at least not beyond the end of this paragraph.
Various parties in the spirit of Halloween have been going on for the last week or so, and though I have heard of none, it would only make sense for them to be continuing today. I have gone to none, mainly in the absence of a costume, also because I've been feeling less like spending money on anything whenever possible.
Moose: Hello? It's open.
There was a knock at the door, and as whoever it was apparently could not hear my invitation to enter, I went to the door and opened it.
Tobin: Moose! I love you!
Moose: What in tarnation!
Tarnation, indeed. I was greeted by a friend I knew from multiple sessions of last-minute math homework, dressed in clothes that would falsely indicate his being of the female gender, who threw himself around me in a hug and kissed me on the cheek. The strong scent of alcohol on his breath fit with the fact that I appeared to be all that kept him from falling over.
Tobin: Aren't you two coming out tonight? Hah… I am so drunk!
Moose: We couldn’t tell. And I'm not going anywhere tonight, I haven't a costume nor the proper state of mind, apparently, if I'm to keep up with you.
Tobin: Fine. I hear my group calling me, I have to go.
Moose: Have a good night.
So I missed the party which apparently placed McGill among the top ten party schools in North America. Let it be known that, as I did not know that we placed so high until very recently, that was by no means any factor in my deciding to come here. In fact, I was expecting quite the opposite, as academically McGill consistently ranks the top in Canada. Which wasn't a factor in my deciding to come here either, I'm here because my math teacher last year advised me to do so, he being a man I aspire to be exactly like in the future.
But the truth remains, that if it is what you desire, there are all sorts of chemicals to be placed into the body to be found around here. I'm hoping that my lack of participation will improve my class standing. Which isn't tremendously difficult, as the most common form of these chemicals, beer, I find to be quite distasteful, and only accept if given at no cost.
Tiff-Annie: They have done tests, and about nine times out of ten, drunkenness is nothing more than a placebo effect. The whole concept seems so primitive.
So there, I'd rather not pay to fool myself into believing that I have fewer inhibitions. Knowing the true meaning of the value in my bank account and that it isn't getting any larger any time soon has made me quite good at avoiding the unnecessary and picking up on free items. My father said I'd learn the value of money yet, and with it regret my decision against a free education from living at home, but I'm still not in any great rush to go back there. Might make for a nice place to visit, though. One must balance the value of money with appreciation of quality: at least, that's the delusion I am still under.
My father has a best friend who he claims is the thriftiest person he knows. This friend of his apparently had plans to publish a book on how to live on less than three thousand dollars per year. I imagine that such a book would be difficult to get a publisher to take, however, as its target demographic is not the type to be spending much of any money on books. He lives through winter in a heavy jacket inside his house, keeping the energy costs to a minimum by turning the heat off whenever possible. He has also never married, and at his age, perhaps never will, though it's not for lack of trying. It seems his minimalist way of life prevents him from meeting others willing to share this minimalist way of life, as it is a way of life not conducive to meeting a great number of people.
Jim: I am the first person he comes to when he wants advice on anything. My friends all trust me, and let me help them, and you won't speak to me.
My father is this man's confidant, and prides himself on that. He refuses to admit, however, that his relationship to me is tremendously different from that between him and his friends. He treated me like a friend, but my idea of a friend at age three was not very developed, so by the time I knew what a true friend was, it wasn't my father.
He took it back, once. Just once, he talked of his friendship to me exclusively in the past tense, indicating as though it were no longer. Then he took back his taking back. Because our relationship isn't a friendship, really. It's neither more or less, it's simply separate.
They say parenting is a greatly rewarding but greatly harrowing task. I should think, however, that childing is just as much of a burden for the child as parenting is to the parent. As children we have everything to learn from nothing, and expectations to meet that are all the worse because we will be accepted even if we don't meet them, because we know then that we won't deserve it. We are expected to know things from experiences we haven't had. We should be able to identify with sets of abstract concepts that makes the human consciousness specific to this planet, things set down centuries ago that were passed down the generations like a twisted form of the telephone game.
For those of you unfamiliar with the telephone game, I preface this explanation by saying that it is neither entertaining nor rewarding to play this game. I recommend it only for situations where you will be able to use it to demonstrate your intellectual superiority over a group of other participants. The telephone game involves a circle of participants, one of whom begins by coming up with a phrase. This phrase is whispered by the first person to the second person, who whispers what he hears to the next person, and so on until it reaches the end. The goal, in a sense, is to transmit the origianl message around the circle. In theory this will generate an amusing garbled version of the original phrase. In practice, the outcome is always either the original phrase intact, in which case the group engages in a simultaneous display of feigned excitement, the word 'operator', in cases where a stupid rule is employed where one may say 'operator' to the person before them to hear the phrase repeated, an insult, placed by some sneaky fellow who wants their opinion of a neighbour announced to the group, or a set of nonsense syllables which are found entertaining by only those under the mental age of four. In any case, it is much more amusing from a mindset that you are above the game, especially when everyone else becomes upset that they were not able to successfully transmit the message.
Jim: According to the government, you're an adult now. But psychology breaks it into more stages - until you are twenty-five, you are a 'young adult'.
Such an inspired name for a category, and yet it does not seem to properly identify with what exactly it is that distinguishes us, other than age. I feel free of certain things, such as the need to report every detail of my life to my parents, which this may be the result of. I feel different in ways I cannot properly describe yet. The previous stages of my life feel decidedly over, which more or less failed to happen when I turned from age nine to age ten, or advanced a level of public schooling. And as I've recounted them here, I suppose that's a good thing. Then again, perhaps I try to look at things too much in terms of good and evil. If I simply accepted that things are more often, I'd be a lot less stressed over things. But then, who's to say that me being less stressed is good? In the large scale of things, I don't really think it matters all so much.
-----
There once was a family which had just increased its number from a family of two to a family of three. The married couple had just been granted a newborn son, whom they immediately fit in the finest of cotton shirts and concrete pants. The inflexible pants provided the boy with a great protection to his lower limbs, and improved his balance such that he was able to walk by the age of seven months, and more than likely had the strongest thighs of any seven-month old one was likely to meet. By contrast, the concrete pants prevented him from using his knees to any extent, such that, when at age three he was given standard legwear for the first time, he did not use his knees at all. This was no matter, though, for he had learned to get along just fine without the use of his knees, and wasn't about to be dependent on them when suddenly they became available for his use.
The boy went through his young childhood ridiculed for his awkward gait and reliance on elevators, but in time trained his stiff legs for use in his own style of martial arts, as though he wielded two clubs by his torso, and was thus able to silence any chortling with a kick to the face. He excelled in his classes and made many good friends, and came to think of his difference as hardly being there at all.
As it would happen in this society, when each child turned the age of eleven, there was a great coming of age ceremony wherein the child scaled a mountain of stairs to the council of elders, who would decide each child's occupation for the remainder of his or her life. This troubled the boy immensely, who had never climbed a stair in his life, much less a mountain of them.
'Father, what should I do?' he asked one day. 'I haven't learned the use of my knees as everyone else has, and I fear I shall never be able to climb a set of stairs!'
'Calm down, my boy,' said his father. 'We will deal with that when the time comes. And if, when the time comes, you cannot climb the stairs, you may stay here with us, and we will gladly provide for you.'
'Mother, what should I do?' he then asked, unsatisfied with his first answer. 'My legs are useless for climbing stairs, and if I cannot climb stairs, I can't see how I should ever find my destiny!'
'Calm down, son,' said his mother. 'There are many a fine opportunities for a lad such as yourself who cannot climb the stairs to the council of elders. You could sing songs on street corners, wash windows, even kick people senseless with those martial arts skills of yours and take their possessions!'
But still the boy was not satisfied. It seemed as though his parents had already written off the possibility of him reaching the council at the top of the mountain of stairs. Almost as if that is what they had planned for.
There were three weeks before he was to turn eleven years of age. He spent every day at the fire escape behind an apartment complex, trying incessantly to conquer the stairs that seemed to him like teeth grinning at him from a menacing smile. 'Wait,' he thought. 'Teeth. That's precisely it.'
It was the day marking eleven years since the boy was born. All his family and friends gathered around the base of the mountain of stairs to commence the ceremony.
'Neil Thomas Hutchinson,' said the village's mayor, 'you come before us to transition from childhood to late childhood. Are you prepared to do so?'
'Yes, sir,' said the boy.
'Then you know what you must do.'
So the boy squared off in front of the stairs. And he let himself fall forward onto them, in such a lifeless motion that the crowd gasped and leaned toward him, held back from assisting him only by the mayor's insistence that they let the boy be for at least a few minutes. The boy reached forward and grabbed the highest stair he could, and pulled himself upward. He then opened his mouth and bit down on the stair in front of his face, freeing his hands to reach yet higher and pull him slowly toward his goal. He bit down again, three stairs higher. He was moving. He was ascending the mountain of stairs.
Hours passed, and the sun began to set as he was reaching the top of the mountain. The crowd below had dispersed except for the boy's parents, who watched their son perform this incredulous act in horror of what he was doing to himself, and in greater fear that he would make it and abandon them forever. And at last he had made it.
At the top of the mountain, he rolled over and kicked the ground forcefully to flip himself over and right himself again. 'Elders,' he said, 'I present myself to you.' As he bowed, one rose and pointed at him.
'Dentist.'