I Can't Be Drunk, Because I'm Wearing A Suit!

           

            For the last week or so, until Sunday morning, the wifi network of the café across the street had not been accessible from my place. This has happened for similar periods in the past, and I assume that the problem is always rectified when they reset their modum. Or maybe their signal diminishes in strength as the month progresses and this marks the beginning of a new month. I’ll take note of this date and see if that theory is true.

            Once again I spent most of the day studying for Tuesday’s exam, rearranging the text into more manageable form. I find that Emmanuel Levinas, while a great thinker, was a lousy writer. He worded his text in an overly complicated manner and sometimes used synonymous adjectives twice in the same sentence.

            Early Monday afternoon I rode downtown to Hart House on campus to meet Naama so we could study together before Tuesday’s exam. She had suggested meeting in the cafeteria, but I found it noisy, and since she wasn’t there yet, I waited outside. A few minutes later I saw her coming across Hart House Circle past the Stewart Observatory. With her height and her slow walk she really cut a magnificent figure. Ennio Morricone’s “Theme from For A Few Dollars More” could have been her soundtrack.

            When we went inside, she could see like I did that the restaurant wasn’t very conducive to studying, so we each bought a coffee. I got the “West Coast Blend”, and said it was because it’s closer to what Starbucks offers; and she got the “Donut Shop Blend”, “Because I’ve always wanted to be a cop.” I asked, “Really?” She answered, no, that she’d never really wanted to be a cop. It was enough that she had been a soldier. I admitted that when I was ten I’d wanted to be a Mountie, but I’d also wanted to be a fireman and a priest. We walked around, looking for a suitable place to study together. There was one cozy little alcove nestled up into the curve of the old stone wall, but there was no outlet for my laptop and I didn’t have a battery. We finally found a large lounge like room that wasn’t too noisy, despite some students playing pool at one end.

            She told me that she was stressed a bit about something that had happened the night before while she was working as a bouncer at Hemingways. She’d had to physically remove a woman from the property, who was high on something and causing a disturbance. After words didn’t work, she’d finally had to put her hands on her, because she didn’t want the male bouncers to touch her, and when she did so, the woman said, “Don’t touch me! I’m a lawyer!” Naama told me that it’s amazing how many people are suddenly lawyers when they are about to get thrown out of a bar. Also, when Naama suggested that she was drunk, the woman said, “How can I be drunk? I’m wearing a suit! Look at how you’re dressed!” Bizarrely, woman had turned it into a class thing, but I think it would make our society very different if they developed drug or alcohol resistant suits so that if you wore one of them you could drink as much as you wanted without getting inebriated.

            We spent some time discussing the possible answers to the essay questions that had been posted for our exam. I had created and edited documents based on Levinas’s writings about the “Face” and those by Derrida about “Proximity”. Naama copied those to her laptop. I hadn’t really thought about the essay questions until our meeting. I had rather been just reading the texts over and over again in hopes of understanding it. It was probably a good thing though that Naama drew me down into the specifics of the exam.

            After going home I spent the rest of the day studying, but went to bed a little earlier than usual.