Tony

As a 22 year old that is also trying to write a book and says things like “it’s okay if it’s blurry, time is relative anyway” to people in coffee shops and can do a nice job of grasciously referencing a few French last names while theorizing the phenomenology of taking a shit on the toilet, living only in the upwardly mobile parts of every city I’ve called home, this film both twisted and knotted together my innards as it felt like I was looking at myself and what I believe to be some of my own egotistical stupidities from outside myself, and simultaneously described something that I’ve thought and reflected on for the past few months. It’s that the academy, especially elite ones, and its cushioned pillows, always there to catch you from the discomforts of rugged sidewalks that aren’t shaded beneath canopied oak trees (*1), has some sedating effect that disturbs and narrows and hollows out the way the world looks outside of it. And the world outside of it has a beauty and wonder and a oneness to it, something the academy can only ever describe but never embody.

When I really ask myself what it is I want to do, my mind immediately goes to working on a fishing boat. And it’s been a desire of mine for the past few years, really. I don’t know why— it probably has something to do with a romanticized feeling I’ve created of waking up at 4:26 or so every morning and wading back and forth in glinting water and taking in some watermelon sunrise way out there and needing to endure the brain-piercing stench of crustaceans and lobsters and having my fingers callused and blistered. But most importantly, it’s this hope I have of being surrounded by people that probably don’t give a single shit about whether or not I can talk about Foucault, where my phallus is not perpetually measured and quantified by GPAs or essay scores or how eloquently I can describe Hegel. 

It feels freeing to me, a life not constrained by the choking grasp of academic eliteness and pretentiousness and WASP-y in-group status games, where daily tasks don’t involve living off a high, a high that is reproduced by every Celsius-sipped-essay I write or macroeconomic profit maximization problem I solve, a high that I got when a sleep-apnea-ed teacher with a slightly gray incisor or manchild debate judge/coach or random parent with their depressed child by their side said I am Gifted and Have Potential and Can Make It To The Promised Land starting at about the ripe age of 4 and a few months.

In that personal context, I think what this film affirmed for me is that it is a deliberate choice to believe that I must follow A Path. That even when it feels like one doesn’t have a choice, that in and of itself is a choice—choosing to believe you don’t have a choice about the life you choose to choose. That it is a choice to go into Microsoft Paint and draw your own amorphous shape and firmly press the paint bucket and confidently fill this dehiscent blob with a color of your own choosing, right up to the very edges. (*2)
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(*1) I recognize that it is a very privileged thing to believe the academy can be a place that feels like this sort of cushion to always fall back on -- many people in the world certainly do not have that luxury, and it is something very easy to take for granted that "school will always be there".

(*2) Granted, though, it might be very difficult to recognize that one does have this sort of utopian access to choice that I am evoking, and certainly, structural barriers and legal apparatuses play a role in constraining or curtailing the ability for one to have this very privileged understanding of freedom. It can be really fucking hard to take a restrained, distanced perspective on the things we technically choose but don't really have any other choice but to choose without recognizing it, because all the other options are ruled out. For instance, I choose to drink coffee every day because not doing so physically hurts my head -- hard to say I have much of a "choice" in this matter. One can surely brainstorm the relevant legal or social analogues to that.