Charlie Brown claimed (and with an infuriating self-righteousness) that nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love. You would think, constant reader, that this would affect me not at all, for I deplore peanut butter. It has the texture of an adhesive, and the alleged flavour is, quite frankly, overrated.
Ah, but I am not dealing with unrequited love, no. In all honesty, if The Peanut Butter Test is the only way I have to find out, then I care not to know! I don't need The Peanut Butter Test, I am perfectly able to make an accurate prognosis. What I am suffering from, and this happens to all scientists, is a classification problem. What I have found is an exotic species of emotion that I know not quite how to classify, which taxonomic box to place in. If only this were unrequited love! How I wish it were! Or unabated lust! Or just a case of The Admiration (easily cured with a Tincture of Idle Gossip)! If it were any of these, I'd dissect it, draw up a diagram, give it a binomial name, pickle it in formalin, place it in a jar, and show it off to pasty school-children, telling them exactly what to expect from late-middle-school to college. You can hardly expect me to hold up my dessicated worm of conscience and say some along the lines of, "Here children, we don't quite know what this is, but feel free to poke around..." Heaven forfend!
The truth is, between the excessive laundry, wardrobe rearrangements, aimless walks, and attacking the secret chocolate store, I don't quite know what I am doing. Or feeling. I am wringing my hands in frustration, the rubicund tint on my cappuccino-coloured flesh is testimony to the hours I have spent doing this, just this, as classical music played in the back-ground and the 'fleurs du mal' of my ever-questioning psyche bloomed under the mood-lighting and caffeinated soil, to release their lingering scent of scruples. What am I doing? Since when did I become the kid who takes to uncharted woods and bites into succulent-looking, unknown mushrooms, and just hopes for the best? This is foolishness! But I want to go on, run an assay, and finally classify this THING that is tumourating amongst my affectations: classify it and put it in a box that shall never be opened again. Why am I even thinking of someone whose affections shall never be mine? But I do not want their affections! No! I...don't know what I want. O God, O God...
What shall I do with this secret? Perhaps, I shall let it fester within. Sepsis? It could happen. I should have known better than to entangle myself with Plantagenets; it's not like they won the war. And I stand to lose so much more than my head. My reputation, for one.
I remain,
GossipGuy.
Brilliantly written. And even that is an understatement.
ReplyDeleteThanks Nabil! You are much too kind.
ReplyDeleteHas it ever occurred to you that some things simply were not meant to be classified? No matter how hard you try there are just some things you can not compare... Examples include:
ReplyDeleteThe meaning of fun
The feeling of cashmere
The beauty of real Burberry
The taste of Swiss chocolate
The guilt you feel when looking at a chocolate fountain
All of these things, are, in the least, indescribable. I believe the feeling you are experiencing is something of the same variety. Perhaps us nerds tend to overrationalize things to a point where we have the compulsive need to make sense of everything- when in reality that is simply not possible. Take some time to stop and think, is it worth the effort? Or is a fundamental "touch me not"?
My dear Ghazal, all of these things you have mentioned are, for one, things I am extremely fond of, and secondly definitions within themselves. I understand what you mean to say, though, it's true that as the knowledgeable elite, we like to have that control by which we can place things into boxes of our own choosing. It's all very well to classify this THING as 'undefined', the square-root of negative one, but that doesn't get us very far, does it? The reason I am so hell-bent determined on classifying this is because I cannot enjoy it for what it is; it is feeding upon me!
ReplyDeleteBut that is how most of us tend to ruin good feelings! We must learn to accept the fact that although there may be a logical explanation to everything, there are times when you simply can't put something in that oh-so-familiar labeled box. Try enjoying the feeling, and then dissecting it as you go to bed. I find it provides irreplaceable moments of insight.
ReplyDelete