For what shall it profit a man...
When I left the Bowtie Cinemas theater in West Hartford earlier this evening (Ride Along 2 was just as funny as I needed it to be), it was to 17 new text messages, all from law school friends and all in reaction to news of the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
It has been an untold joy to have been unplugged from much of the larger (digital) world while all of this unfolded. Even reading about it in the Guardian, one could hear in the distance that cacophonous rumble, the political point-scoring and strategizing, the disingenuous eulogies and outright rejection of the edict not to speak ill of the deceased. One by-product of being relatively divorced from the noise is that I'm in no rush to form an opinion. My only contact with the man was through his vituperative dissents and the abhorrent logic, prized in law schools and lionized in legal academia, of which his judicial opinions were made. But he was a human being once. And that's about as far as I've cared to think on the matter.
Later in the night, some ways into my Corporations lectures, I made my first Monster run, a thing which probably should have begun earlier, discovering with no small amount of joy that the CITGO next to the Masonic Lodge, the one across the street from the local CVS, stocks Baller's Blend. My favorite flavor and a mainstay of my 2L fall at Columbia.
There's a trope in certain anime of an inner beast or something of the sort taking over a character, usually the hero, if that character submits to its will, and gaining untold power but, in exchange, losing control over the things that make him a hero, namely his humanity. We see it when Heero Yuy pilots the Epyon Gundam for the first time. A more recent and perhaps more famous example is that of Uzumaki Naruto and the Nine-Tails. But my first, and most lasting, impression of that trope was during a Sunday morning cartoon that aired on UPN when I was a child:
Slade is uniquely, genetically, able to pilot his machine, but it comes with a time-limit, and if he passes that limit, his personality dissolves and he enters berserker mode and becomes a sublimely gifted killing machine.
If Blessing ever sees the light of a bookshelf in anything resembling her current form, people will be able to trace the genealogy of that trope. The other meaningful manifestation of the trope occurs in Akira, perhaps in much more visceral form with Tetsuo's power quite literally devouring him whole. Conquering him.
In many ways, the Faustian bargain is its Western analog. Or maybe, even before that, a verse in the Gospel of Mark, Chapter 8: "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" (36)
I've an exam coming up, on the result of which rests, quite possibly, an entire future. It's a dance I've done once already and, though excuses and equivocations proliferate, the psychic toll has been heavy. In two separate conversations yesterday, I'd said or had repeated back to me the maxim that no single test is worth one's sanity. And it's true. But the doubt nestled beneath that sentiment whispers that self-care might have swung too far in the other direction to become laziness and insouciance. That foregoing a look at yet another practice essay can be chalked up to "taking care of myself". Wedged between the two aforementioned conversations was another where I asked someone very close and whose example I have sought my entire life to emulate how she did it, how she made it all work, studying for her own licensing exam while raising kids all in the midst of changing careers during the recession. And she replied that she had no choice.
The impulse to bisect the human population into normal and deranged is easy and wrong and inevitable. For Normals, "I had no choice" is the engine that leads to success, where, for the deranged, there is naught left to contemplate but the "or else."
I'm brought back to college and the ways I would sometimes run full-tilt towards the completion of a paper or preparation for an exam or project or presentation. The ground would be littered with library books and empty envelopes with notes scribbled on their backs. The rubbish bin overflows with empty Red Bull cans, and I've lost count of how many times I've watched the sun rise. The memory is lying when it tells me none of it hurt, but that's what I hear now when it whispers to me.
I don't expect I'll have too many more opportunities like this, bottled up moments where I'm caged in familiar surroundings with a single, solitary task, and the chance to make another one of those runs. Those memories thrill me, and I know now that the thrill lies in how fast I was driving the car, the danger I was courting. Not in contemplation of any sense of invincibility, but rather out of some darker impulse I could disguise as a productivity-jones.
If Mephistopheles were to visit me, I don't know what I would say. But I've already opened my first can of Monster for the night.
It has been an untold joy to have been unplugged from much of the larger (digital) world while all of this unfolded. Even reading about it in the Guardian, one could hear in the distance that cacophonous rumble, the political point-scoring and strategizing, the disingenuous eulogies and outright rejection of the edict not to speak ill of the deceased. One by-product of being relatively divorced from the noise is that I'm in no rush to form an opinion. My only contact with the man was through his vituperative dissents and the abhorrent logic, prized in law schools and lionized in legal academia, of which his judicial opinions were made. But he was a human being once. And that's about as far as I've cared to think on the matter.
Later in the night, some ways into my Corporations lectures, I made my first Monster run, a thing which probably should have begun earlier, discovering with no small amount of joy that the CITGO next to the Masonic Lodge, the one across the street from the local CVS, stocks Baller's Blend. My favorite flavor and a mainstay of my 2L fall at Columbia.
There's a trope in certain anime of an inner beast or something of the sort taking over a character, usually the hero, if that character submits to its will, and gaining untold power but, in exchange, losing control over the things that make him a hero, namely his humanity. We see it when Heero Yuy pilots the Epyon Gundam for the first time. A more recent and perhaps more famous example is that of Uzumaki Naruto and the Nine-Tails. But my first, and most lasting, impression of that trope was during a Sunday morning cartoon that aired on UPN when I was a child:
Click to viewSlade is uniquely, genetically, able to pilot his machine, but it comes with a time-limit, and if he passes that limit, his personality dissolves and he enters berserker mode and becomes a sublimely gifted killing machine.
If Blessing ever sees the light of a bookshelf in anything resembling her current form, people will be able to trace the genealogy of that trope. The other meaningful manifestation of the trope occurs in Akira, perhaps in much more visceral form with Tetsuo's power quite literally devouring him whole. Conquering him.
In many ways, the Faustian bargain is its Western analog. Or maybe, even before that, a verse in the Gospel of Mark, Chapter 8: "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" (36)
I've an exam coming up, on the result of which rests, quite possibly, an entire future. It's a dance I've done once already and, though excuses and equivocations proliferate, the psychic toll has been heavy. In two separate conversations yesterday, I'd said or had repeated back to me the maxim that no single test is worth one's sanity. And it's true. But the doubt nestled beneath that sentiment whispers that self-care might have swung too far in the other direction to become laziness and insouciance. That foregoing a look at yet another practice essay can be chalked up to "taking care of myself". Wedged between the two aforementioned conversations was another where I asked someone very close and whose example I have sought my entire life to emulate how she did it, how she made it all work, studying for her own licensing exam while raising kids all in the midst of changing careers during the recession. And she replied that she had no choice.
The impulse to bisect the human population into normal and deranged is easy and wrong and inevitable. For Normals, "I had no choice" is the engine that leads to success, where, for the deranged, there is naught left to contemplate but the "or else."
I'm brought back to college and the ways I would sometimes run full-tilt towards the completion of a paper or preparation for an exam or project or presentation. The ground would be littered with library books and empty envelopes with notes scribbled on their backs. The rubbish bin overflows with empty Red Bull cans, and I've lost count of how many times I've watched the sun rise. The memory is lying when it tells me none of it hurt, but that's what I hear now when it whispers to me.
I don't expect I'll have too many more opportunities like this, bottled up moments where I'm caged in familiar surroundings with a single, solitary task, and the chance to make another one of those runs. Those memories thrill me, and I know now that the thrill lies in how fast I was driving the car, the danger I was courting. Not in contemplation of any sense of invincibility, but rather out of some darker impulse I could disguise as a productivity-jones.
If Mephistopheles were to visit me, I don't know what I would say. But I've already opened my first can of Monster for the night.