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sublingua | |||||
| The heart with a mind of its own.(Be present.) | The mind with a heart of its own.(It's past.) | The dream that is your waking life.(Go there now.) | |||
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Coffee With The Zen-Hating Demon
I suppose I should go ahead and tell about the afternoon coffee date with Magdalene: I wasn�t feeling well the day we were supposed to meet (I have this damned cold that is being passed around my little group of friends), so I left campus early and went home to rest for a bit. I called Magdalene to let her know that I wasn�t on campus, but had come home. I asked her to call when she was leaving work and that we could meet at The Frontier, a restaurant about a block and a half from both my apartment and her on-campus jobsite. I had intended to sleep for a few hours and get up when she called, but I only slept fitfully for a bit, woke to a neighbor�s loud phone call, and decided not to try to get back to sleep but to get dressed and head down to The Frontier to sit and study some biochem while I waited for Magdalene to call. At 2:45 or so she called to tell me that she was getting off work at 3:30 and could meet me then. I let her know that I was already at the restaurant and would wait for her there. I read a bit more of my biochem text and watched a couple that didn�t seem to know each other very well try to get to know each other a little better. They were both in their early 20�s, painfully white, and, I would guess from the tag end of the conversation that I walked in on, both in vet school. The man was a bit of a motor mouth and the woman was reduced to the typical conversational responses that verbose people inspire in the polite. He talked and talked and she nodded and smiled and mm-mm'd and finished her lunch. He wasn�t saying anything of any particular interest, just babbling on enthusiastically about what kind of terrific person he was and so on. And then, noticing that she had finished her lunch, but that he had balanced the same forkful of food in the air the whole time, he rather cluelessly said, �I�m sorry I eat so slow.� And I was, like, buddy, it�s not that you eat too slowly, it�s that you talk too goddamned much. But he redeemed himself a bit later by buying a drunken street-person�a man completely sloshed but smelling ever so minty fresh because he had gotten completely sloshed on mouthwash�lunch. I kinda liked the guy after that, though he could�ve used some remedial conversational work. And I am tempted, writing about this couple, to play the Buddhist game that I love so much of: If Your Life Were A Dream, How Would You Interpret It? And, in this case, this couple, this polite and conversationally skilled girl and this clueless but well-meaning boy, I�d have to say were something of the Cliff�s Notes version of the Sublingua-Magdalene pairing. Magdalene came into the room where I was. She walks in a kind of loping, happy gait that I am always surprised to see. She was wearing glasses and was dressed like the kind of student she is�that is, a relatively serious one, as evidenced by the slouchy sweatshirt, oversized jeans, no makeup look�and not like one of those girls who thinks school is an excuse to try out that hot new clubbing outfit. So she was herself. And I think, except for feeling like I was going to cough up a lung, that I was myself. And so it was a bit awkward. We moved into a different room and sat in a booth. She retrieved her lunch (chicken nachos) and made a comment about the jalapenos not being pickled. I congratulated her on her successful law school bid, and she deflected this by saying that no one expected her to be other than successful. We chatted about classes. She�s taking a class with the Good Professor and Matthew and his big friend Heath. I brought up Matthew almost immediately�which I knew was a mistake even as I was doing it. And she deflected the question I asked about how it was for her to have to sit in a class with him. So instead I brought up her other classes, and we ran through them. She�s taking a class in Zen philosophy because she has to to graduate�a situation that I find quite amusing, being somewhat inclined to find the idea of feeling as one were being forced to study Zen amusing. (And amusing too because it�s the parallel idea to my feeling about Zen, which is that I can�t afford to get too close to it because then I end up feeling guilty for not doing the right thing, not forcing myself to do the right thing and study it, devote my life to it.) She is taking Japanese with a woman I like very much, but whom she dislikes very much. She is taking a Japanese history class that she is afraid is going to be dumbed down too much to cater to �ninja lovers.� She is taking a couple of other things that escape me at the moment. More English I think and perhaps a bit more history. So we talked about those things and then she brought the conversation around to Matthew. �He hates you because you tried to make peace with him,� she said. And at first I was puzzled by this. It was the kind of statement that I have habitually to stop and examine for the ratio of truth to wishful thinking in it. (Was it true and therefore devoid of wishful thinking? Was it mostly true and therefore only partially imbued with wishful thinking? Was it not true at all and therefore entirely composed of wishful thinking?) I finally decided that it was such a Christian attitude�and Matthew tries so hard to be the consummate Christian�to hate the person who extends the olive branch of peace that her assertion had to be true. I told Magdalene of this conclusion and laughed. And then we talked a bit more about his behavior in class, about how he made her feel inferior (something I assured her that he works very hard at), and then we thankfully left the subject. We didn�t talk about the night. We didn�t use him as an excuse to segue into a conversation about sex. So it was fine. We talked about other things too: About how she couldn�t be a doctor because she was �too clumsy.� About how she thought she might like to learn how to drive. About her cat�s recent sexual hang-ups. About Phil and her feeling that he isn�t the smartest guy in the world but that she loves him anyway. (Which may be true, but for some reason, I got the distinct feeling that it was the kind of conversation that has, as a long-term sort of goal, the establishment of the basis upon which she�ll leave him when she finishes law school.) She suggested that we �go somewhere.� I didn�t know where to go, and, thinking of our spate of afternoons at the bar down the street, asked her if she were still not drinking. She is drinking, something like a drink a day, and said that she was up to some drink on her �Wheel of Drinks� (a kind of gimmicky drinks recipe wheel that Phil gave her on her 21st birthday) that required cr�me de cacao. We decided to walk up to Walgreen�s to see if their liquor department sold it. My apartment is on the way, and we stopped there so that I could drop off my books. Leaving, we ran into Lea. Lea has heard all the Magdalene exploits, but had never met Magdalene before. We talked about the stray cats in the neighborhood and told Lea we were going to Walgreen�s. �NO LIQUOR!� Lea yelled at us as we were walking away. I informed her that that was precisely why we were going to Walgreen�s. �Then stay away from strangers in white vans!� she yelled. We laughed. Magdalene and I walked up to Walgreen�s and she told me that Lynch had started smoking to �get out of parties.� I asked her the classic smoker�s question of, �What brand does he smoke?� She, being a non-smoker, didn�t know. She asked me the correct pronunciation of Marlboro and told me that Lynch had broken up with his girlfriend. Walgreen�s sadly didn�t sell cr�me de cacao. After milling around the liquor department for a bit, we left. She decided to walk back to campus to meet Phil, rather than having him pick her up away from their usual spot. I told her I�d walk with her back to campus, as I had to check the bookstore for my quant textbook and buy a lab notebook. On the walk back to campus, we talked about spirituality (I have no idea how we got on this topic). She said that she was �an atheist by default.� I asked why she was an atheist and was corrected: �I said �atheist by default.�� I asked, �What�s the difference between being an �atheist by default� and being an actual atheist?� She admitted that there was probably none, but that her atheism was born of a kind of materialism. That is, that she couldn�t think about spirituality when there were credit card bills to be paid. She informed me that she had recently paid off her credit card bills. (�Right,� I said, �Using student loans.� And she giggled and agreed that this was how she had done it.) We discussed other financial matters including her trust fund and her father�s quarter-million dollar house and spendthrift ways. We crossed Central onto campus and parted in front of the bookstore a bit chattily, not terribly awkwardly. And that was coffee with Magdalene. And this is Magdalene (a self-portrait taken in early December). She looks very cynical in this picture, doesn't she?
More lies:
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