i blow donkey at keeping in touch with old friends. take albrecht for example: i’ve known him for twenty years and if we ever meet these days it’s cause he’s coming around. ok, fair enough, i’m way more broke than he is, but still. it leaves me with a tad bit of a guilty conscience.
the other week he got his doctorate (doctors hat?) in physics, or rather quantum mechanics, or rather in string theory, or rather, a two dimentional analysys of string theory? seriously, for two hours i sat giggling at the examination – these people use scientific theorems as adjectives fer crying out loud. i understood the language, i understood the seperate words, but i could not under any circumstance (except when they talked semantics) understand what they were talking about.
in short, it was awesome to watch and i’m way impressed by whatever-the-hell ali has been doing these past years. in my head, it’s rewarding to know that there are so many things still to learn, and that there’s no chance in hell i’ll ever learn even a smidgen of that.
my ambition has always been to know a little about a lot of things,i don’t know if ambition is the correct term. maybe predisposition or, well, symptoms of attention deficit disorder. but not to spend more than a month or two researching it . in contrast, ali has been doing this non-stop (as i recall it) since high-school. i was thrilled.
after two hours (ok, two hours was the upper limit of even my chuckling) i left the university and plodded around town for a bit. my date had fucked off on a train, leaving me with a crushed heart, so i proceded to the dinner thingy ali had gotten together. 20-odd people were at the bar/restaurant and to compensate for my mood i used what little i know of physics and made chatty with the people from alis’ university.
once you don’t live close to each other, it’s an odd sensation when you meet your old friends’ new friends. they have a different take on the person you think you know so well, and it’s disconcerning. on the other hand, they were all nice people and i ended up talking politics, radical activism and medical implantations until the bar closed. plopped down on a couch at alis and his girlfriends house (which was more tempting than my original plan of wandering the streets for six hours, wallowing in hate and self-pity and maybe getting into a fight) and was frightened the night through by their two cats that played “tag” on me.
next day: bought a ticket, went to the library and read up on futurist photography, saw a jenny holtz exhibition, sat on a train, then got slightly drunk in the company of friends. all in all, an enlightening trip.
