My Personalised Zahir

I was starkly reminded of Borges' Zahir recently.

At times this image comes to mind: a coin that has been scratched and perpetually haunts the owner who cannot rid himself of it. The owner does not even want to get rid of it. Yet it weighs so heavily on their mind as to drive them utterly insane.

I actually began to identify a person I knew as my Zahir. Meeting with them upset my nerves and made me very worried. They were like a coin that I could not or chose not to rid myself of. Yet they did nothing whatsoever to justify this. They are a truly brilliant person. The fact is, I saw them as my Zahir because they reminded me that I am a terrible person. My evasion of this person hammers home just the kind of emotionless shell that I am.

This post underlines the fact even more so. The audacity that I have to actually think of a living person with real emotions and a real vivacity as a drain on my existence makes me physically nauseous. How dare I. This is despicable behaviour and my callous rape of this image for writing material is vile. My word, my non-existent reader, my mind: do not make this worse by pitying me. The only Zahir is my utterly rotten mind. I am monstrous.

I am scum.

-The English Student

Social Positioning System

Sometimes I do wish that I could turn my brain off in social situations. It would spare us all these overblown analyses.

I was amongst a group of fairly new friends. Things were going well and there was plenty of enjoyable and pleasant conversation. Two people that I had never met before were introduced to me and my night took a turn. These people were lovely, open and friendly, while I was not. I became quiet, practically mute and watched in awe as a friend, having just met them himself went on to have a brilliant conversation with them. I skulked off to another table without even an excuse or a good-bye. The more I write about this, the more disgusted I get with myself so it is time to move on to the imaginary significance I have dreamed up for this event.

I have always found excuses to be on the outside of social activity. For a long time, being on the outside was a physical alignment. I could not go to certain events because I lived too far away or I would not be able to return home after them. People understood this and recognised what felt like a genuine desire to be a more social person. I believed that this was a reason, when in fact it was an excuse. Perhaps people know this and forgive my anti-social behaviour.

I cannot be entirely scathing to myself on this point. I have made quite a few friends recently and have in a sense, moved closer to the centre of this group of friends. But even if I have moved closer to the centre, that does not mean that I have allowed the group to move closer to my centre. Becoming more honest and more open might let me position myself closer to people.

My word, it might even give me a chance to be happy.

-The English Student

Vanilla Advertising

A seemingly trivial event just happened to me that, as usual, I am about to blow out of all proportion.

I was sitting in a fine establishment waiting for a fine friend of mine. Arriving first, I took a seat at a table and absently watched the nearby television. There was a sporting event on it that I took little notice of and at the finishing of the match, a usual generic series of advertisements began playing. At some point during these advertisements, the sound to the television was remotely turned off and music began playing instead. I did not even notice this change until into the second advertisement. The music so perfectly fit the visuals that the change was negligible until overt.

My initial thought was that the song was just one of those pieces of music that you would expect to hear during an advertisement. It was light, had some inoffensive lyrics and was of a tempo that either matched up well with an advertisement, or served as a suitable contrast to the action of an advertisement. I just assumed that this song was an ideal candidate as an accompaniment to advertisements.

This is probably a harsh judgement on the musician. The more I heard the song the more forgiving I was. In the end, I have to conclude that this little instances makes more of a statement in relation to the advertisements rather than the song. These broadcasts were so generic, so utterly forgettable that I was not even able to discern a difference between them when the same sound was played throughout. I title this piece "Vanilla Advertising" not just because of the implication that all of the broadcasts were essentially the same. I like the taste of vanilla and the effect that this music had on my viewing was also relatively pleasurable. I was able to view them as a whole piece, not containing a contrived agenda and overall, not having any real effect on me.

It is remarkable how small events like this can truly threaten the pull of the advertising world.

-The English Student

What is going on above us?

There have been a plethora of serious air incidents in the past two weeks.

The massive threat from an Al-Qaeda plot to blow up two cargo planes has been well documented. The planes were loaded with explosives that managed to cross various border and security controls and were only found after a tip from a Saudi agent. Following this, a plane crash near Karachi on Friday killed twenty-one people, while a Cuban plane crash killed 68 the previous day. Coupled with the grounding of the Qantas A380s due to engine flaws equates to a terrifying sky-scape.

The fragility of this mode of transport is in one sense quite shocking. Plane travel is a standard method of travel. While it can be a nuisance, it is a necessary nuisance of modern life. The benefits of flight have far outweighed the inconvenience of it. However, when you scale things back and look at the actual process of flight, the whole prospect is far more terrifying. We get into large metal containers, strap rockets to them and hope to survive the natural conditions of weather and gravity that would utterly annihilate the attempt when given the chance.

It takes a string of high profile incidents for unobservant people like myself to actually notice this fragility. Perhaps it is better this way. After all, we do not want to take the place of McEwan's protagonist in Saturday; thinking a plane will crash and therefore causing it to do so. All of these fragile modern conveniences teeter on the brink of destruction and threaten to sweep our entire method of life away with it.

Is it better then to grieve the loss and destruction caused by these incidents than to dwell on the fragile systems that caused them? Doing so creates an argument that some life is expendable so long as it maintains the structures of life.

-The English Student