Ejection

I've been caught up writing this ridiculous paper for my "China in the Modern World" class since this weekend. One would hope I wouldn't need five days to write 5-7 pages, but here I am, and after much hand wringing over how to approach such a hopelessly vague topic (tip: if the prompt contains the world "bio-political", drop the class), sometime in the last couple days I finally built a framework for writing something that could be considered half decent. And sometime last night, I realized that what I was writing had nothing to do with that framework, and I had to change it. I'm finally in the home stretch now after making my topic more comfortable, and I wanted to share a vignette with you all. In my essay, I say that a character was essentially ejected from her past, traveling further and further away from the life she had known previously and actually shedding her identity bit by bit until an entirely dissociated personality rises up and "kills" her previous one. This person was shot out of a cannon from her previous life and her previous self, and when she landed she was in a foreign country and had completely lost her mind.

Well, I feel like, in a sense, sometime yesterday I ejected from this wreck of a week... grabbed the bare essentials of kendo and mandatory classes, pulled the handle under my seat and shot skyward toward the weekend. And yet I feel like sometime in the future I'll have to pay for the crashed jet of my neglected classes and work.

Don't care though. Too stoked for the weekend.

Also, yesterday at kendo practice our sensei introduced perhaps the coolest exercise I could possibly imagine on so little sleep. He had half of the people in armor stand on either side of the room, with one lone soul standing between the two groups. One person from either side would alternate running toward the person in the middle, trying to strike the person's head, while the person in the middle would try to dodge and counterattack by striking them in the torso as they ran through. For minutes on end, the person in the middle would have to fend off constant attack from both sides, having barely enough (and sometimes not enough) time to turn around, face the next opponent, and counterattack. Too fucking cool.

Finally, a gentleman walked in to the coffee lounge this morning and stood next to where I was sitting, typing away, with a distant look on his face as if he were looking for something. I made the mistake of looking up and making eye contact, at which point he points vaguely in the direction of my computer and asks, "What's that?". I stare for a couple seconds and reply, "What's...what?". Rather than answering my question, he asks me what I think about the economy, and if I thought we were in a recession. I told him I probably wasn't the one to ask, but if I had to give an answer I'd say we were heading that way, yeah. On hearing that I wasn't, in fact, an economist, he points to my screen and asks, "That isn't economics". Long pause. "No, this is literary analysis". "Do you think there'll be a job waiting for you?". "Maybe not a conventional one, and maybe not in this country, but yeah, there will be". He walks off.

Maybe he ejected too.