I had a very good Christmas break, thanks for asking.
Unfortunately, it seems that everyone had exactly the same Christmas break. At least, that's what we all tell each other.
"How was your break?"
"Good. You?"
"Solid. What'd you do?"
"Hung out, slept a lot. Watched a lot of TV."
"Me too!"
This is not exactly the kind of vibrant intellectual exchange that TJ envisioned for his Academical Village.
This happens every time we come back from a break. Of course, people don't actually care when they ask you this. They couldn't care less. I've decided recently to get back at them by answering their callously disinterested questions with the most bizarre stories from my break. Like: "My break was good. I dropped my brother's mattress from a third-floor window." Or: "I had a great time. I chopped a half-cord of firewood and almost got hit in the head by an ax four times."
I don't know if stories like these are better or worse answers to the constant questioning about my break, although the startled fear in the eyes of my listeners is a pretty clear indication as to how they feel. I really enjoy the novelty of responding to those questions with something other than tales of gluttony and narcolepsy, though, so I am sometimes tempted to just make up lies. Like: "My break was awesome! I repressed a peasant uprising on my family's estate in Poland." Or: "I'm glad to be back. Some assassins my mom knew in college have been staying with us, and the throwing stars have started to get a little old."
Of course, there remains a place for people who respond simply and honestly, by admitting that the general themes of their break were, in fact, food and sleep. There's no shame in that.
In fact, the first two weeks of my break were nothing more than a variation on the theme of eating and relaxing. I watched so many of the weird ABC Family Channel claymation movies that I started to walk like the bizarre dentist-elf from the Rudolph movie. I constantly expected beautiful women to appear out of crowds and start up corny banter with me, just like in the Spike TV Bond-a-thon. And then, of course, after watching "A Christmas Story" no fewer than four consecutive times, I couldn't care less whether the idiot child got his damn rifle or not.
So I confess it, nothing interesting happened to me in December. I slept, and ate and watched TV. In January, though, things were a little different. I took a rocking good J-term, IMP 223: "Technology and Citizenship: Hurricane Katrina." This class was just superb. The first week we spent in Charlottesville, studying the disaster of New Orleans and its aftermath from a variety of perspectives (like architecture, engineering, history and anthropology). It was an enthralling investigation in the reinforcing tensions of different disciplines within a very particular subject like the Gulf Coast disaster.
But then we went down to New Orleans, and all the items of our in-class week resonated somehow against our work in the city. But being there was very strange and disturbing. For all that the specter of Katrina has been haunting America for six months now and for all that I spent a week of six-hour classes studying New Orleans, I had no immediate grasp on the awful comprehensiveness of the ruin. On the last day of our stay, I stood on a street corner in the Ninth Ward with my roommate and fellow adventurer in New Orleans, and nowhere we looked could we see any sign of life. It was like standing on a set from a disaster movie. The contrasts were maybe the strangest; you could drive through a thriving, busy, crowded neighborhood with long lines in the shops and then, passing over a bridge, enter a crushed desolation of sorrowing houses.
These were contrasts just like my break: weeks of fat leisure set against weeks of constant mental activity and demanding physical labor. I'm back here now, in my beloved home-away-from-home sheltered in the mountains, fending off the perpetually eager but actually heartless questions about my break. I had a hard but a really good time. I hope you all did, too, my friends. Let's just not forget that a lot of people didn't.
Connor's column runs bi-weekly on Fridays. He can be reached at sullivan@cavalierdaily.com.
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