Paranoia Lost

Incidentally, I ought to be sleeping but instead I'm sitting here contemplating a mish-mash of things from various books I read recently, and, unfortunately, keeping awake late enough into the early morning that I won't attend my morning anthropology class as I had insisted. The sad part is, as I realized very early, generally, there will be no loss if I miss class because we're not marked for attendance but rather our ability to analyse and criticise, and write a convincing essay, which I can do with the text-books and word processor here at home. If you will, call this an apology for my recent, flippant choices to skip, or, rather, to use a better phrase, to do what is in the interest of my own physical and mental health. This sounds utterly selfish, and demeaning to my teachers who are obviously intelligent, well-read individuals themselves, but truly I have no intent this year, unlike previous years, personally, to drive myself to the brink of exhaustion by pandering to and realizing someone else's foreign, inimitable dream. Nor have I the desire to be dragged naively, repeatedly through the delirious and perilous experience of hazardous health, narcosis and ill relationships this year as I learned from past experience by counting - whereas depending on someone at least suggests a bearable co-operative symbiosis or quest - on the shadows and strangers of the world to be benign. This is the year I won't deny what I've work so hard to achieve for my own health and knowledge by reading widely and voraciously, my calling for these erstwhile years, since I left the belly of the high-school whale on my mission to the proverbial Ninevah, university.

Then again, my analogy is cruel and, perhaps, ironic if I remember correctly because the citizens of Ninevah listened to Jonah - to his surprising chagrin - after he gave up trying to shirk his duty to speak (or preach) to them, because he coldly and selfishly thought himself above them, but this, in fact, is what put him on the perilous path to bittersweet recognition. Hmm. Interesting. It seems after reading Frye's The Great Code, I've begun to see and re-enact his idea - case in point, tonight - or this morning, which ever it is.