odd empty feeling, like looking at pictures of the frontal lobes of the lobotomized or reading about the egyptians taking your brain out through your nose piece by piece: I am about to find out how dumb I am all over again, and it won’t be about obvious stuff like last time. my professors won’t be surprised at my inability to navigate by the stars or find dry wood in the winter or remember which is the constitution and which is the declaration of independence. (lincoln thought the latter was the conscience of the former. lincoln’s interpretation gives us the responsibility of applying to the constitution the moral compass which the founders prescribed for it. the problem with this is the separation of the document and its moral compass: since we assume responsibility for the constitution, all its faults become ours, as we’ve been given the sparknotes.

something about the second round. like the first was just an episode. passing thing. it could have been a dream. in whatever span of time there is between the first and second experience, there’s an uncertainty about whether anything happened at all. then there’s doubt over what it would mean if it did happen. then of course questions about what its lack of meaning due to lack of its existence would mean of itself. more appropriately, of its lack of self.

these questions are all set against the apprehension of starting it all over again- whatever “it” was in the first place, which is always difficult-to-impossible to get straight, even in hindsight- knowing that there will always be expectations. “you have done this before,” they will say. “you’re an old hand at this.” (“they” could mean “you,” which is a kafkaesque kind of gruesome.)

who remembers in the first place? isn’t it relative? we live in the irony age, after all. everything’s supposed to boil down to either a failure to communicate or a question of perspective. to suggest otherwise, well, that’s a step backwards. that’s what we’re fighting, quietly, without admitting the sin of admission. we simplify problems to their most basic components, then we ignore these parts, because they are common sense. hard-coded pragmatism.

funny story, in common law, the moot rule does not apply to cases which are capable of repetition, yet evading review. am I yet at the point in time when I willingly apply this to my life at college? will I say that I’m trying the same case every semester, even though its verdict won’t really affect the underlying problem? or if it’s not even a part of the solution? the hell if I know, I’ve only been doing this for one year.