It hasn’t quite registered yet that I’ve graduated, and the vacation has been more or less a series of ambiguously connected days separated by the missing hours for when I pass out every other day. Believe it or not, I haven’t gone out yet, and I don’t quite feel the need to, since the career debates have taken over most of my cognitive abilities. Choosing a major is harder than one might think, that is when you put into consideration how you’ll be stuck with the choice you made at the myopic age of 19 for the rest of your life. I got a whiff of how unjust capitalism can be, when the choices in the private sector where limited to a pattern that seemed to appeal to my paranoid side. The choice isn’t really a choice, but rather an act of elimination between predestined odds that are only few fractions apart and more or less lead to the same dead end. Researching doesn’t seem to make those odds any better, and a friend’s theory about how democracy is an illusion, custom-designed to give the proletariat a wrongful sense of control started to seem a lot more tangible in effect. Not that it matters anyway.
I was getting my hair done the other day, and while stuck halfway down the waiting list, the sight of a couple of children amused me. Bored by their mother’s constraining schedule, what seemed to be a 9-year-old girl and a 6-year-old boy struck an odd sort of temporary friendship. The girl, who looked more sheltered and introverted, completely absorbed in her little utopic bubble of French Disney movies on her new, laminated laptop, didn’t seem to acknowledge the existence of the more lively boy, who acted rather vulgar and was very loud and undisciplined. The boy indulged in elaborate conversations with himself out loud, ones that didn’t make sense to any intelligent and evolved creature outside of his little distracted mind, making comparisons between dogs and towers, marveling at how colours sounded alike but looked different, touching everything within an arm’s reach turning it into a rubble, was circling the area where the girl was complacently absorbed in her own world. She didn’t seem to understand why he was the way he was, nor find it more amusing than the Rapunzel movie at hand, but instinctively adjusted her seating position to allow him more access to her laptop, surprisingly inviting him in her introverted comfort zone to enjoy the movie alongside. The boy, intrigued by the colourful set of hair rollers in a nearby basket, put them on his fingers and tried to attack the girl with his newly-installed claws. The girl watched him the same way she watched her movie, a little blankly and without any recognition to his extra dimension. She then calmly took them off his fingers, and made an elaborate tower with the help of hair pins to fix the helix intact, and presented it to the boy, who, in his more neanderthalic age limitation thought it was a downright act of sorcery. She tried to explain the mechanism but he insisted that he knew how to make it. He went around the place pretending it was indeed he who made it, then tried to sit on it and ended up in a ball on the floor when his pedestal collapsed under the weight of his ignorance. The girl, again, was rather amused, congratulated him on his craftsmanship and presently went back to her movie, forgetting he existed in the convenient two-minute attention span peculiar to children, leaving the boy staring at her with a vengefully helpless look that reminded me of the boy on ‘The Omen.’
Watching from a distance, I entertained thoughts of Simone de Beauvoir being more amused by the live metaphor at hand than most of those she could have drawn on to give her theories ground. The boastful male marking his territory and claiming right to everything around him while remaining stubbornly ignorant, the more intelligent female who although more qualified would give up credit of her work in response to her gender’s societal demands. I wondered how many times that happened in the adult world, how many times that could have been avoided if this 7-minute-review of life, the universe and everything was shown on huge screens in a behavioural science lab. The irony of gender inequality unraveling in a hair salon. Ha.
On an irrelevant note, since my first car will most probably be a beetle, I have decided I will settle to no less than this:
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