Philosophers

I am STILL writing this motherfucking paper due last winter, for a graduate course that nearly gave me an ulcer.

[Do you understand i used to be a Type B personality? My parents come from an equatorial, tropical island goddamnit. Now look at me. PHILOSOPHY GIVES ME ULCERS. This is the second consecutive week in which my DREAMS HAVE BEEN ABOUT KIDNEY FUNCTION. I have nervous twitches and environmentally induced OCD--I count how many strokes my toothbrush makes. Dozens of generations of rice farmers and school teachers and now this--a neurotic, latte sucking, obsessive american mess]

The professor of political philosophy for whom the paper is due is Very Good. I mean, other professional scholars and most grown intellectuals fall in rapture at his name. It is not clear why...he is an incredibly mild mannered man. But then you hear him speak a bit and you are like...goddamn, he is so brilliantly REASONABLE. If you listen more, there is incredibly undertow of devastating and dry-like-bone wit. He is not one of the charismatic geniuses--the ones i dreamed of coming to berkeley, wildly throwing chalk at the board. He is neatly dressed, polite, quite calm. And yet, as suspect as all the build up is, you are softly lulled into a mad revelation: this man is incredibly brilliant. His mind with great ease takes the complexities of the most complex philosophical tomes--or even the complete mess of your own thoughts--and in one brush returns it with elegant lucidity. His mind is the equivalent of a ballerina--feats of ridiculous bodily contortions with the ease of floating feathers, and the rigid aesthetic of euclidian geometry.

And THAT is why i can't finish this fucking paper. Just to talk to him i have a bodily sympathetic nervous system reaction. My heart beats faster, i sweat and i stutter. I am a grown ass woman, you know, I've been in school for decades, I shouldn't be afraid of professors anymore. But this one...its like having some sort of massive intellectual crush. I am the 12 year old nerdy girl again, and I've just met the Dreamy Rock Star.

[No, no, its not like that*; the record stands, the man appears to be stably married and has a son approximately my age. but in that uneasy way that sexual desire and intellectual rapture cross wires, they set off the eerily similar downstream devastation]

He is incredibly nice. But...nice like a philosophy professor. The Philosophers are among the most polite, measured, and civilized of all the scholars--a reputation they've cultivated since Seneca and the best of the Stoics. No impassioned screaming; why bother when you can simply lay it out in set theory? And yet...underneath it all, you know quite well there is the mildest, gentlest condescension. They think you are rather dumb, but that's alright, they are used to it.

And so here i am, sucking lattes and agonizing.