shouts of doubts

so i think i have it all figured out: i am a central european spirit trapped within an asian attitude. if the volume of my voice were directly proportional with only my certitude (and not also with the invasive doubts), it would be terrible to behold, so the state of affairs is mostly for the best. but today i let a non-Miltonian free lunch slip by me (in the same fashion as at the Ark, where, on two occasions, i allowed prizes to go unclaimed despite my name being called—but worse, because, in the case at hand, i had actually done something for the goods in question) solely because i have grounded the entirety of my existential angst upon the dilemma-ed act of leaping out of my seat. it goes without saying, however, that something upon which the crux of the matter is based cannot actually be done....

there's nothing like a classroom setting to bring out this dichotomy. it was probably Sazi who made the original remark—about me never raising my hand unless the situation was so absolutely dire that there was, really, no other recourse but for me to put a swift end, in the form of a concise explanation, to the gross confusion running into babble.

if it were just about knowledge, that would be one thing: the lightest of them. but where there's (and, often, even where there's not, but only presumed to be) knowledge, there's a collection of fragile knowers, most of whom do not do at all well with argumentation.

there was the little issue of the dative and the locative case the other day. actually, to be fair, there was my issue of these two cases, because i was scrounging around in our textbook and found the horrible, totally dissatisfactory answer to the elliptical allusions which had emerged in class on several incidences. which is to say: both author and professor have made the same (idiotic) executive decision to completely conflate the dative and the locative, presenting them both as The Dative merely because, without exception, the noun endings are the same for the two cases. lies lies lies. this whole thing angers me to no end. it's pedagogy at its worst. it's a travesty of Language and, by extension, we who (hope/presume to) exist in it.

when this matter actually came up in class (yesterday), i managed to keep my mouth closed. it took a lot of effort. but i considered what i would gain by lividity (about the same, i concluded, as i would have accomplished by loudly informing my classmates that they would never (at the rate they were going, by which i mean: dragging us to) be conducting interviews in That Language for PhD research by autumn, as they had purportedly aimed at the start of the course and, presumably, even beforehand (when they were in That Country, obviously squandering everything except for (probably) money), since they had applied to the IU program in early spring))), and it would likely have come to naught.

sitting through another agonising silence today, solely because i copied sentence after correct sentence into my notebook while the rampant mistakes piled up on every side, i realised that while i was, technically, correct in my outrage about the dative/locative falsity being passed off as grammar—today's "correctness" was actually more potentially provocative. i might have been able to say something yesterday. sure, i might also have come across as a lunatic with some misplaced metaphysical (love, spirituality, scriptural) aspirations. but (apart from the text's author, who was not present; one point for Thomas Magner), no one would have taken offense. what would have happened, however, had i leapt to the board every time i dotted the full stop this morning? to bring the rhetorical answer into all its obviousness: clearly, i would not have even had to leap for the resentments and self-pities to fly so thickly that we would never have been able to open the door at 12:30.

it ought to be the other way around: umbrage should be taken when and where universals are violated, with great caution elsewhere, and only in the rarest of cases where personals are concerned; it is a tragedy (passed off as "human nature") that this whole hierarchy is inverted, in direction and relative volume of each segment in its pyramidal structure.

and that, my friends, is why, when the professor offered to buy lunch for the person who wrote the final correct sentence on the board—and even when he extended his offer to those who, having flippantly written and (even more so) erred, wrote again—i stayed in my seat, knowing i would later eat cherries and think back, with neither fondness nor regret, on the year when a teacher (mine) called me by a name (supposedly mine) so mispronounced that it was no longer.

what are the things known so unshakeably that it is an affront not to claim them, say them, write them in deliberate letters across a board filled, otherwise, with broken-sprawled nonsensicalities?