Head Full Of Sawdust, Please Send Help
Writing six essays in three weeks is hardly the stuff of inspiring documentaries about the strength of the human spirit, but it's now rapidly getting to the point where my brain is going down for the third time while Celine Dion squawks in the background. I'm hobbling along on the mental equivalent of crutches, hence that truly appalling Titanic reference in the place of my usual viperous metaphors, and with nine days to go, the truly weird behaviour has begun- stuff for a documentary in and of itself, perhaps.
Symptoms include:
++ Decisions that ancient thinkers are your mortal enemy, and that if (aided by some rip in the warp of space-time) they suddenly appeared in your study, you would take advantage of their confusion to stomp very hard on their beards and yell at them about the fallacies in their arguments. This is generally not a nice way to treat suddenly-transmorgified ancient thinkers, who would probably have enough to deal with without strange blue-haired girls grabbing their toga-fronts and yelling at them incomprehensibly about objectivism.
++ Inadvertently inserting phrases like 'that destabilises the argument!' into perfectly normal conversations about boyfriends, peas, and why we don't have any milk left.
++ Developing a hives-producing allergy to certain words (mine include 'discourse', 'tension' and 'belligerent') which may develop into a full-fledged feeling of paranoia and eventually end in Apprehended Violence Orders against various segments of the Oxford English Dictionary.
++ Discovering, in a series of bleak moments, that all your sarcasm, vocabulary and general intellectual wherewithal are now housed entirely on Microsoft Word in your laptop, leaving none whatsoever left over for normal social interaction. Over the past few days I've strived five minutes for the word 'better', called somebody a goat because I couldn't think of a better insult, completely failed to make an effective joke about New Zealanders and been unable to articulate my true thoughts about the Keira Frightly version of Pride & Prejudice beyond exclamation marks and physical convulsion.
This sort of brain-drain doesn't appear to be analogous to the long-term dripping of material out of my neural passageways (for instance, I discovered recently that multiplication has now become an entirely foreign country, alongside division, factoring and the more subtle nuances of subtraction, though I can still add to within an accurate margin of about three). There just does not seem to be enough of my brain to be charming and lucid about Judith Wright and Margaret Cavendish while also sustaining the lucidity and not-charm-but-still-rather-alluring-prickliness of my everyday self. I'm so weary that I'm actually being humourlessly nice.
I'm also so weary that I can't be belligerently interesting and on-topic for the course of a single Vox post, for which I make my apologies. Depending on how this next week goes, this blog will either become flooded with outbursts of extended ranting about Aristotle's unattractive nose hairs, or I'll return to a state of caustic coherence for long enough to eulogise the philosophy part of my degree, say, and report back on the screening and Q&A of Dexter I'm attending tonight.
If Michael C. Hall says the word 'discourse', though, the blood spatter will become much less fictional.
