Nonsense Verse

You know you're back in school when ...

... you start having nightmares about grades.

Last night, I had a dream. Not a nightmare, okay, but more a mildly bad dream, an anxiety dream, in which I got back my first paper of the semester and it said — drum roll — B+. And I was DEVASTATED. This was a paper I had spent hours agonizing over: the first I'd written in nine years, my first chance to make an impression, my first true test. So what if it needed to be only three pages. So what if the topic was pretty much open. So what if one might argue this was the sort of thing I should be able to do in my sleep. The pressure was on! It's been years since I did the thesis → argument → back up argument thing. I can't remember the last time I wrote a footnote. (But oh, how I did enjoy Googling "footnote" and relearning how to do one. So orderly, the little footnotes. So mini. So cute.) In all, I spent a good three or four days revisiting the paper and tweaking and rewriting before I turned it in. If there hadn't been a deadline, I might still have been tweaking it last night. And then today. And into next week.

But back to the dream. In scanning the paper and reading the teacher's notes, I realized this was not my paper at all. The highlighted passages were crystal clear — when I woke up, I probably could have written them down if I had thought to reach for a pen — and they were quite distinctly not mine. Whew.

Then it happened again. I handed in the paper, got back another, began reading and realized that this, too, was not my paper. I turned that one back in, and ... it happened again. Which was way too much for my subconscious to handle, apparently, because then I woke up.

And so it begins.*

* Not that this is a bad thing. I might say this was going to be a looong semester, if only I wasn’t having so much damn fun.

Word of the day: koan

Today I was reading the title essay in Joan Didion's "The White Album," and at one point she described a question she had once been posed as "a kind of koan of the period" (the period being 1970, and the question being, "If you can't believe you're going to heaven in your own body and on a first-name basis with all the members of your family, then what's the point of dying?").

Right.

I remember learning the meaning of "koan" many years ago, probably in a community college class called The Philosophy of Religions. But I could not remember the precise definition this time, so I went to look it up. This is one given by the American Heritage Dictionary:

A puzzling, often paradoxical statement or story, used in Zen Buddhism as an aid to meditation and a means of gaining spiritual awakening.

The etymology of the word, from the Online Etymology Dictionary, I found even more revealing:

Zen paradox, 1946, from Jap. ko "public" + an "matter for thought."

So there I had my answer, and a fairly concise way to repeat the definition, should I happen to be asked at, say, a cocktail party, "Do you know the meaning of the word 'koan'?"

Now, because I love the idea of there being such a short, catchy little word to describe such an esoteric concept, I kept reading the handy page of information provided me by Dictionary.com. I wanted to know more about koans, to read some examples of them. And happy day, at the bottom of the list of definitions was en entry from Jargon File (aka The New Hacker's Dictionary), pointing to "Some AI Koans" (as in "artificial intelligence") -- "jokes told at the MIT AI Lab about various noted hackers."

Jackpot. Now, I could geek out on koans while also geeking out on geek jokes! Ah, symmetry.

There's also something charming about peeking into these people's worlds, glimpsing how their minds work. These are humans who process information in a way I can never hope to. They can read an "Ed. note" like this -- "Pure reference-count garbage collectors have problems with circular structures that point to themselves" -- and know exactly what that editor is talking about. I kind of get it. Especially in the context of the joke. But not really. At that same cocktail party, if someone were to come up to me and say, "Ain't it a bitch about those pure reference-point garbage collectors," I would have to simply smile and nod, and down my drink so as to have an excuse to go seek out the bar. And yet, having eavesdropped on this tiny bit of MIT humor, and having giggled along with the parts of the jokes I did understand, I somehow feel that much cozier with the crazy-smart people. And all thanks to Didion and koans and Internet blessings like Dictionary.com.