Going to Normal School

I had an interesting conversation the other day.

I was talking to a colleague about this, that and the other and happened to mention that I was a bit bored now that I only have one job. Uhm, well… one job and a freelance thing and two other projects. The guy looks at me. And looks at me.

-You should take a course in how to be normal, he says.
-The what with the who now? I answer intelligently.
-Yeah. You should be sent to normal school.

He pauses. Considers.

-It would be the only course you ever failed, he says and chuckles at his own joke, being sort of lame like that.
-Probably, I concede. “I’m fucked-up in about nine different ways.”

All true too.

I can’t really explain the many ways in which this is funny without going into how many people I know who have at some point told me how weird I am – while I on the other hand of course think I’m perfectly normal and sane and with all the shit I know about people (I have that kind of face, you know? people tell me shit) think that they’re all bonkers.

It’s really a sliding scale. It is. Normal … well, now, that’s one of those concepts that guys like Foucault get off on picking apart. It’s just what the general consensus has decided for the moment should be taken as the normative state. So I don’t really have a lot of confidence in the general principle behind the concept.

Here’s what you need to keep at the front of your frontal lobe – normal only means “normal to me”, as in “what I find normative due to societal consensus”.

Uhm. I guess pleading my case with the aid of French post-structuralists doesn’t really help, does it?

Anyway – Normal School. We probably all took that course.

Some of us just sat at the back and doodled in our notebooks, is all.

ROL

More food for thought

I believe in the betterment of your mental faculties. I would, too, being a rational and reasonably intelligent creature.

The more time you spend thinking about your philosophical predicament, the less time you spend thinking about the shit that’s going to give you an ulcer.

To that end I will furnish my reader with more food for thought in the form of modern day koans.

Here is today’s thought fodder:

* How much can I get away with and still go to heaven?

* If time heals all wounds, how come bellybuttons don’t fill in?

* Why is it that bullets ricochet off of Superman’s chest, but he ducks when the gun is thrown at him?

ROL

Modern day koans

I assume my esteemed reader is a learned person. I assume my most cherished and learned reader is well educated and intelligent. The beauteous spark of my enchanting reader’s acumen is what engenders such concord between us.

I am speaking to you today of the notion of the “koan” – as used in Zen Buddhist meditation. There the teacher may ask the student to ponder such a question as “does a dog have Buddha-nature or not?” – though I think the most famous ones are “if a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one there to hear it, does it still make a sound” and “what is the sound of one hand clapping” – you know, stuff f that nature.

When you spend a great deal of time amounting a mass of words, like I have, you tend to go off on things like that.

This is neither here not there, I guess, but I found what you might describe as modern day koans and I will now, in my Zen way, share some of them for the pleasure and amusement of my most valued and esteemed reader for them to ponder at their leisure.

They are as follows:

* Whose cruel idea was it for the word ‘lisp’ to have an ’s’ in it?

*Why are there flotation devices under airplane seats instead of parachutes?

* Why did kamikaze pilots wear helmets?

*Why do toasters always have a setting that burns the toast to a horrible crisp, which no decent human being would eat?

Now, run along and meditate on these under a bodhi tree and see if you might, by this measure, gain enlightenment.

I remain, as always, you humble servant.

ROL