Passing by

If a day could be called by how much its events resemble the feeling in particular stories, today would be a David Sedaris book.  

I spent the entire morning (and a chunk of the afternoon) in bed (or more precisely, on two large square futons amid endlessly reproducing pillows), alternating between reading his book Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim and sleeping.  It's one of those days I get, when even with a full night's sleep of seven or eight hours, I still while away the entire day sleeping.  I didn't have to go to class until 5:30 in the afternoon, so, like anybody who promised to have the most productive day ever, I slept, and produced sweat.  The day passed me by.

I had time enough before 5:30 to go to the lecture room when I noticed an LBC package on my table.  It was from my former student, who is now an author of what appears to be a children's book based on his blog.  It wasn't a children's book. It was a good one, though, irreverently funny, insightful, and it was not lost to me that the only literature I seem to read nowadays were collections of short, autobiographical snippets of self-contained pieces.  It's like facing a looking glass containing separate mirrors, held by the metaphysical glue of an author's sheer personality, each story a small globe of related or unrelated events. How related or unrelated depends on anything from the amount of coffee you've had during the day to the number of surviving neurons you still have - but coffee or neurons regardless, you still have one hell of a book in your hands. Whether the universe decided to send books like these my way now or if my brain decided, without consulting me, that it could only process a certain word count from here on, the last five books I read were my student's and Sedaris's.  I am comforted by this, without understanding why.  I was thinking of this vagueness on my way home, and decided against the explanation involving worlds and stories and art imitating life and all the ridiculous things we say when we can't be bothered to think anymore but still want to sound like we make sense.  

At the door of my classroom a sign read "No classes under ELL 325 today (25 November 2013). Make-up schedule to be consulted."  I must have read that sign within 3 seconds, stood for another 5, and decided that if no reactionary feeling is going to come after 8 seconds then it's not worth the bloody trouble manufacturing one.  So I went home in a tricycle the driver of which decided to stop for gas along the highway.  The attendants were lumped around two terminals, and on the other end of the station was a fully naked woman, perhaps fifty years old or so judging by the way her breasts and stomach sagged, shouting what sounds like curses.  What with the tricycle driver shouting at the attendants and the attendants shouting back, and all the other drivers shouting at one another along the highway, I couldn't make out what the naked woman was saying.  I think she finally shouted at us when the driver made a U-turn and passed her by.

Merging with traffic, the tricycle I was on ended behind a friend's car, which he told me a week ago was recently bought for his father.  It was a red sports car, and obviously new - the plate was just a surface containing two cardboard letters and four cardboard numbers.  I had the fleeting idea of calling him up, saying something lame like "Hey, nice car," when I realized he was driving.  And, after all, what should I say next? "I'm right behind you, can you drive me home so I can shave off 40 bucks from my fare?.. Sure, you can, just veer to the right and inconvenience three lanes and wait for me while the tricycle does exactly the same thing!"  So I just proceeded to stare at his car's spoiler, wondering what it was for.  After a few hundred metres of following him, there was a traffic aide, signalling his car to proceed and signalling our tricycle to slow up and let pedestrians cross.  After a few hundred metres came another crossing, and came the same signals - "go ahead," to him, and "slow down," to us.  The third time this happened I decided that either the traffic aides were counting cars that should pass, or that my friend's red sports car had telekinetic powers apart from all those horses underneath the hood.  

We eventually lost him, and I eventually got home, paying the full fare.  I went back to my futons, and to Sedaris, and, not without contentment, opened my student's book and proceeded to read.