Now I'm definitely having sleep problems. My little room is on the second story and is not air-conditioned. I lay in bed late into the night, a thin film of sweat over my body, the air getting thicker and thicker and my skin beginning to crawl with imagined insects. Last night I only managed 4 hours of sleep, the second time this has happened this week. But I don't feel tired so maybe I have nothing to worry about.
Things are no better at work. The other guys in my room have taken to going in early, because there's no air-conditioner in there and it becomes like hell itself in the afternoon. Gets difficult to think, and everyone's temperature begins to rise. There are many outbursts of frustration. You would think that a media office with a panoramic 3d screen and 20 pairs of 3d glasses that cost 500 Euros a piece could afford a simple air circulation system. The main office of the department just across the hall, where most people work, is well air-conditioned, so there's a puzzling discrepancy here.
I looked at my face this morning after shaving and saw a bunch of red blotches around my jawline, not pimples exactly but close enough. What with all this continual sweating I had a teenager's nightmare vision of my face slowly rotting. Jungle rot setting in, only on my face. It felt like I needed to take a hundred showers to get clean of this horrible feeling. As a kid, the constant affliction of pimples which began way too early in the third grade made me think of the following thing, which I remembered again today: I wished I could take a picture of my face every day, first thing when I woke up, in the same exact position so as to allow for a giant flipbook of my face over the course of my life. It would be weirdly fascinating at the end of it all to review my life in a few seconds, baby-face becoming kid-face becoming angular teenager face becoming bearded middle-aged face becoming wrinkled old man face. Somewhere in the early middle of this flipbook the pimples would be going off like firecrackers, and then they would gradually die out. I think at the time I thought this up I very much needed to convince myself of the transitory nature of pimples.
Today, again, we went to the Isar after work. But it was a totally different experience. For one, it was in the center of Munich. And the water was way too fast to comfortably swim in. It took Mark and Norman and I quite a while to get organized, so by the time we got out there, the sun had disappeared and the hot crappy day had been replaced by a grey crappy one.
There was some confusion in navigating Munich (big surprise here). Spirits seemed somewhat low, even with Norman around. We laid out our blankets and got to talking about girls, which led to some cynical remarks from me about another great exchange that takes place between the sexes. Norman wasn't taking any of this seriously even though Mark and I were. He told me that we were too young to think seriously about things. Maybe this is true, but I can't just give up on the world and consider it all one big joke as some people seem to. Pressing on, we eventually got to talking about religion and the ultra-serious, at which point Norman dropped the bomb and showed us why life had forced him to regard it as a sort of joke.
Out of respect for the guy I won't recount it, but suffice it to say that some awful (this does not begin to describe) things happened to him very recently, of which I had no idea, and now knowing them still cannot fathom. He was suddenly bitter about a lot of things. I can only hope that laying them out in the open did him some good.
Recovering the conversation, I told them about the five Platonic solids and how my introduction to them recently had been the closest thing to a religious experience I've had in years. I was completely amazed and mystified by the fact that there should only be 5. Why 5? Why not some other number, 7, 10, 11, an infinite number? I recall telling my professor about this and asking him these questions, and saying "Who decided this?" "What do you mean who decided this," he said, "it comes out of The Math. It's been proven." He didn't understand what I meant at first--a little archetypal, don't you think? "No, I mean in a metaphysical sense," I said. "Oh." And he laughed at this and the misunderstanding that had just taken place. "I don't know," he said, smiling.
Posted by Alan at June 19, 2002 11:16 PM