It’s that time of summer when Concrete University fills up with people again, like increasing amounts of water poured into a balloon. The part of me that retains a vestigial student identity takes delight in this—new students all cautious optimism, bare feet and smiling faces, the tents that spring up everywhere with various club and commercial wares within, the sheer buzz of it all—but increasingly the young-old curmudgeon trumps at least some of the time, regretting the loss of green and leafy space unencumbered by human faces, as the place loses its summer identity as an actual hermitage.
Now that enrolment is so much an online phenomenon, the yearly ritual of queueing for three or four hours is gone, as therefore are the day-long friendships struck up with others in the queue (although my memory of people thus met suggests there were more obnoxious than charming characters). As if in response, the banks in particular have become more aggressive in soliciting student custom, promising free gifts and offering their services through the persons of attractive students in tight tops, signing people up left right and centre. I am a bit regretful that I can no longer pass for a student to these people since it means I won’t get to tell them just how much debt I already have with my bank, with the right blend of smugness and self-righteousness. Woe is me, for I am a homeowner.
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I am in an ill humour, as a result of a work matter earlier today whose details I had best not put on the internet. It’s no big matter, and the moment that so irked me is already past, but still: gargh. I console myself by remembering how my early days on the job were filled with moments like these, but that doesn’t make such occasional occurrences in the present easier to stomach. I suppose most of us have periods of feeling we’re square pegs in round holes; perhaps I should honour my self-pity with a rousing torch song?
So consider this entry an attempt at diversion. Plenty has been a-happenin’, not least of which has been the visit of my aunt and uncle from the Old Country, during which they are considering, among other things, the question of whether to relocate here. That will remain unanswered for the moment, but it has been a treat to see them. Initial nervousness gave way to familial camaraderie, of a kind strong enough to withstand our getting mightily rained on at the original date for Bic Runga’s Waipara show, then enjoying the performance yesterday evening, on which it was sufficiently dry for the show to go ahead.
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The latest entry at the Fundy Post provides, in the context of its argument, a working definition of atheism with which I am in accord. Reading it set me to thinking of how I cherish my atheism, which I consider hard-won, not in the sense of having to work hard not to believe in a deity, but in allowing myself to accept the fact that I don’t. Coming to a point of good-humoured, workaday atheism has been as character-defining for me as questions of sexual identity have for others. (I don’t doubt that if I’d focused more on sex and less on culture and philosophy when I was a student, my personal identity politics might be rather more interestingly-skewed.)
What makes one person an atheist and another a follower of religion? One could play the game in standard terms and say that one or other has the truth and the other is mistaken, though this seems to me hardly the point. It doesn’t bother me that I may be wrong in my atheism, because it remains for me the most accurate expression of how I understand the world, at the same time as it best expresses my own temperament, which is irretrievably sceptical.
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The hope expressed in my last entry, that the cold and wet weather was an aberration rather than the template for our summer, has turned out to be false so far as January is concerned. It is curious how snipy and resentful this has made everyone, myself included, since being angry at the weather surely ranks high among the more futile of life’s activities. However, how could I react to Bill’s contention, that only four of the fortnight of days he’s taken off intermittently this summer have been fine, with anything other than outrage? Rarely, outside of union duties, has my work email contained so much feisty rhetoric. False hope still rests in February, though; as the hottest month of the year we are all expecting a lot from it.
It has been a month of change, under the cloud-filled sky. Around new year, I took myself back to the state of singlehood. This I did with sorrow, and not at all lightly, and with the voluntary promise not to narrate it on the internet, so I shall say little more. I had hoped, naively no doubt, to make it through life without electively causing pain to another in this way, but that hope is set aside now. For the first time in a long time I’m entirely happy in my solitude and will cherish it as long as that emotion lasts.
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So it’s summer, my friends, though the weather ain’t so great, and this humble journal has passed its third anniversary. I fear I’ve made fewer posts this year than I made in the first month of keeping it, but judging by the continuing silence on my buddy list, it might well be the nature of online diaries to peter all but out. Nonetheless, I’m still here, albeit running on fewer cylinders, and not quite ready to let these pages embrace the fullness of obscurity yet.
The last six weeks have seen many things happening. Most recent of these was harvestdad’s retirement from Concrete University after sixteen years. There was morning tea, and an impressive and apparently impromptu speech from harvestdad, which harvestmother compared to the one he made at their wedding for its extensiveness and the possibility that it might never end. Hearing him address those colleagues was one of those rare moments of grasping the otherness of one’s loved ones: while I’ve been slogging and angsting and starring in my own dramas, harvestdad has, on an adjacent stage, been choosing his own adventures. One speaker present commented that an era of technicians is on the wane, what he called the electro-mechanical era. By way of illustration, harvestdad’s farewell gift was a working valve radio in a heavy wood cabinet, assembled by the remaining technical officers with the aforementioned skills. It takes a bit of moving around to get consistent reception, but looks very fine indeed.
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3 February, 2007
in commentatrix,Diaryland
The latest entry at the Fundy Post provides, in the context of its argument, a working definition of atheism with which I am in accord. Reading it set me to thinking of how I cherish my atheism, which I consider hard-won, not in the sense of having to work hard not to believe in a deity, but in allowing myself to accept the fact that I don’t. Coming to a point of good-humoured, workaday atheism has been as character-defining for me as questions of sexual identity have for others. (I don’t doubt that if I’d focused more on sex and less on culture and philosophy when I was a student, my personal identity politics might be rather more interestingly-skewed.)
What makes one person an atheist and another a follower of religion? One could play the game in standard terms and say that one or other has the truth and the other is mistaken, though this seems to me hardly the point. It doesn’t bother me that I may be wrong in my atheism, because it remains for me the most accurate expression of how I understand the world, at the same time as it best expresses my own temperament, which is irretrievably sceptical.
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