I’ve recently found myself a student again… And boy, how things have changed!
Back in the day, sitting in the back row of the lecture room simply meant getting out of class quicker when time ran out, or being able to take an unseen nap to recover from building your RAG float. Now it means you were late because of the crap traffic on Jan Smuts and have to take the last seat available and squint yourself into a headache because your vision suddenly seems not to be able to reach the screen – despite it being good-quality projection from a nice powerful Apple Mac.
Talking about computers: pen and paper was always good enough for taking notes. An empty pen was a much smaller distraction than your machine suddenly seizing up mid-lesson, leading to fruitless mouse bashing and a frantic search for an empty seat… And losing track of the lesson while you’re at it. That’s where your gradual loss of brain matter becomes achingly clear: it’s not so easy to catch up once you’ve gone off the rails, what with grumbling to yourself and moving chairs and booting up the achingly slow Mac… Suddenly, I’m the slow student asking the annoying questions that are perfectly obvious to the young ‘uns rolling their eyes with barely disguised contempt. And even when I do follow, it doesn’t mean things stick… I have to practice, repeatedly going over theorems and applications until it finally sinks in.
Kind of like life, I suppose. You just can’t get away with skimming the surface of things and breezing along anymore. Taking the metaphorical back seat just means you lose sight of what’s real, what means something. And then you find yourself questioning things that you should have figured out by now, right? Bashing your head over and over and over again before a lesson sinks in… You’d think that with age and experience would come wisdom, but nooo…
And when you drag your aching, tired body and mind back home, you just don’t have the energy to go join that party down at the men’s res. Trying something new? Overrated. Stick to oblivion.
Not that I’d necessarily want to go back to my sharp-eyed younger days. For one thing, these days cafeterias serve toasted banana bread with honey instead of sticky, slimy and three-day-old cheese tramezzinis. And things might not have become any easier, but at least I now realize what the stakes are… After all, I’ve paid a truckload of money to learn about the wonders of manipulating life through imagery and creating my own magic. So best I shape up and take the punches of late night classes after a full day working and weekends spent bashing my head on the keyboard to make it all sink it… Or ship out and return to blissful days systematically spent in waving my brain cells away… Nothing worthwhile is easy, right? Right. And perhaps, one morning, I’ll wake up and boom – enlightenment! Hopefully with not too many bruises showing…
Tags: Donnay Torr, dustbunniesproject, life, studying