Thursday, June 5, 2008

High on Life

There are these times when I am sitting with friends, spewing out nonsense in nothing less than emphatic tones. And then something happens, everyone gets tired and the air turns languid. This usually happens after a rigorous day of college when we are thankful the madness has gotten over for the day. For me the day usually gets over at around 6, though my classes usually get over by 3 - but labs keep us on our toes throughout the day and evening, literally so. So after all of that, some innocent gibberish seems refreshing.

But the point is, everybody is so tired by the end of the day, nobody is really listening if somebody actually tries to talk sense. If someone whines, we smile understandingly, hoping it will be a response good enough. If someone yells, we pretend we didn't hear, if someone cracks a joke which seems too complex - no one bothers to care what it means, everyone lets out a compromising chuckle pretending they totally got it or some crap.

Meanwhile someone may say something that may have caught our attention, but at the wrong place. Which means someone may have caught just phrase, a word, or even a syllable that may have aroused some distant version of a bleak momentary interest. It's like we sit up for a moment "Wait a minute there might be something interesting going on over here!" But only to realise it's too much of an effort to go through all the nuances of the story.
So we slouch back down into infectous slumber, arms limp, knees flaccid - indolent, drugged. Lifeless and free, we sometimes find it impossible to drag ourselves back up to the rooms, so we settle down in the lawn adjoining the hostel.
The bed seems too far away, the grass is just a lot easier then.



2 comments:

Coal Miner's Granddaughter said...

Yep, definitely sounds like college to me! You brought back some great memories. I promise, when it's over, your brain will function again and you'll remember what it's like to have normal conversations.

Until you have kids, that is!

Narcoleptic said...

Yeah, thank God for that.
Right now my brain is so meddled with, I can't manage to get one coherent sentence out in the first try.