Of Felt and Freedom

It has been quite a while since I wrote here, and that is unfortunate. Built-up snark can wreak quite a deal of havok upon one’s digestion. The reason for such a paucity of writing is one-fold: college.

Surprisingly, I’m not talking about being busy, I’m talking about being bored. Last time I checked, the institutions of higher learning are supposed to be Mecca’s of intellectualism, both among the faculty and the students. The faculty has not disappointed, they earn their dues quite well. However, the student body appears to have all suffered from lead poisoning and embalmation at some point in their childhoods. There are three modes of existence here: drudgery exhibited during the regular weekday, drunkenness over the weekends, and memorizing (which needs no descriptor). This is alarming; there is a distinct difference between learning and memorizing, and memorizing seems to be the culture here.

Memorization is the bane of modern knowledge; computers can memorize vast amounts of information with nary an error, yet apparently students still need to memorize banalities like exact year of an event or the specific structures of an algorithm. If I wanted to become an index of data, I’d lobotomize myself and fill the empty space with a solid-state hard drive1 (and rename myself “EletrcoRainMan”2).

Perhaps this is just the first-year experience in full swing, yet if that is the case then why do I see upper classmen performing the same deluded rituals as my fellow freshmen? Porter-Gaud, my high-school alma mater, had its faults—I will be the first to admit that—yet students there were done, for all intents and purposes, with memorizing vast troves of information by junior high. It has been quite disheartening to descend from such a culture of learning to a veritable katorga of intellectual stimulation. I’ve come to the conclusion that I need to develop some sort of augmented reality filter-glasses to hide the depressing fact-burdened drones from view3, leaving only the knowledgeable professors and pre-approved verified non-drone students in view. And damn is that a depressing conclusion.

On a cathartic note, today I perpetrated some gruesome war crimes on some neon felt balls (and a metal-composite racquet) for the first time in couple of years. Tennis has a way of improving one’s mood; it’s like being a highfalutin caveman garbed in synthetics and corporate branding. And unlike golf—tennis’s brother in cathartic-hitting-the-shit-out-of-helpless-balls—you can actually play it with speed. Amazingly, I left the court in a good mood; my anger at the inanity of this place replaced with a troglodytic satisfaction4. Tennis is without a doubt a life sport, in that it keeps you in touch with life instead of receding from it into enraged insanity.

  1. I wonder if, in a Matrix-sort-of-way, the electrochemical reactions in our nervous system could produce enough energy to power a solid-state drive.

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  2. I’d consider doing this even if it didn’t work just to meet Dustin Hoffman. His performance in Stranger Than Fiction was too incredible for words.↩

  3. Preferably obscured with pictures of bacon.↩

  4. And some slight annoyance at how rotten my forehand has become (however, my backhand can still shear the felt off a ball in a single hit).↩