"It's a statement," she said. I looked at her from across the table
where we ate lunch. It was snowing outside, then sunny, then snowing
again. If you don't like the weather in Rochester, wait five minutes.
"What, like a political commentary?" I was already finished with my
meal, trained from the day I entered school to eat quickly, or don't
eat. We were cattle, all of us, being pasteurized by this vacant
education until we're ready to be sold. She had already finished before
I'd sat down, so we had time to just talk. We have thatnow, in college
- time to talk. We're not constrained to the twenty minutes that was
beaten into us in elementary school cafeterias across the country. We
have an hour, two hours, maybe, between classes in which to relax
among friends. I have three and a half hours. That's because the
teacher never showed up to Intro to Psych. We waited around over 20
minutes -- half the class left after 15. Personally, I think it was an
experiment by the instructor. If you're a psych teacher and don't fuck
with your students, you don't deserve to be a psych teacher. After 20
minutes, two thirds of the class had left. I decided to be an outlier. I
am merely a statistic.
"No, more like a personal one. He's saying how if we wear masks long
enough, eventually they cover the inside of ourselves, as well, fill us,
and so compose our very being."
It was a clear plastic bottle of Ocean Spray orange juice. The label had
been torn off the outside and put on the inside.
"But the label is inside out. Looking in, the words are backwards," I
said. "He obviously is making a social statement against capitalism.
The bottle is symbolic of the rising of the proletariat." She laughed, I
continued. "The oppressed workers will turn the images of
commercialism back upon themselves, exposing the lies they
proclaim, thus winning back freedom."
Dave's turn, who had been sitting silent, sick today with a cold.
"Maybe," he began, "he was just bored."
Perhaps boredom is the medium of pronouncing truth, then. But that's
doubtful. And so, conversation ended, we spoke of our greatness.

09/23/2001

Posted on 09/23/2001
Copyright © 2025 Gary Hoffmann