April 19, 2008

• Brilliant moments are a rarity in the lives of us ordinary proles.  We wake up each day and go from conversation to conversation, for the most part conversing with people according to the linear model predetermined by conversational decorum.  On occassion a conversation may take a few pleasant turns and end up somewhere comparatively interesting, but they are still few and far in between.  And even in the case that such a terrace of interest has been reached, it is still not the plateau of brilliance, and even if it is the plateau, it may still be that it has not been reached simultaneously by an entire group of people.

  Yesterday I arrived at Italian class fairly early.  Class starts at 1:30 and I walked through the door at about 1:10 with the three other people who had arrived.  Not many people were expected to show up, since only about fifteen people out of twenty-five in the class had been coming each day for the past week, and it was a beautiful Friday afternoon.  But on the other hand there was a test on Monday which we were going to review for, so perhaps that would balance the scales and most of the class would show up.

  But by 1:20 it was still only myself and three others in the class, and our wonderful teacher Adriana.  Normally the people who came to class would show up really early and then no one else would come.  Since it was such a beautiful day and such a paucity of students had come, we pleaded with Adriana to let us have class outside.  Adriana is a grad student and is always very cheerful and easygoing, so she whimsically replied that if only one more student shows up by the time class starts then we could have class outside.  Only one more student.  Since this criterion would be hard to meet we also demanded that she give us all the answers to the test.  She jokingly agreed, prompting myself and Benito (his Italian name for the class) to rush out into the hallway to block arriving students from coming to class. 

  Our classroom is in the middle of a long hallway, so Benito and I could each take one end of the hallway to block.  However, we were basically kidding and eventually floated back to the classroom where we continued to chat with each other and Adriana.  I did ask Adriana, “So can we really stop people from coming to class?” to which she responded with an ambiguous shrug.  But I still decided to come back into the classroom given the hopelessness of only one more student agreeing to come to class, and partially for the fact that everyone did need to review for the test.  One more student had showed up by this time, about 1:23, and thus we were at our maximum.

  But time rolled on.  No more students showed up.  Adriana stared at the classroom clock reading 1:28 and commented, “This is blowing my mind.  Where is everyone?!”  We had been talking about different things while waiting for people to arrive (including a girl in my class’s hair, which she never lets down, and she did and it was huge, prompting Benito to suggest she could rove the hallways scaring all the other students off), but at this point I decided to saunter out into the hallway out of mild curiosity for where everyone was. 

  Shockingly, I walk outside to see about ten of my classmates standing in perfect silence in the hallway right outside the classroom.  I immediately understood.  Benito had surreptitiously told the first student who had showed up that we could go outside if only one more student showed up, and that student told the rest of the students as they arrived, preventing them all from entering the classroom.  Benito had been floating around the door, so his feat of accomplishing this without anyone inside the classroom knowing was quite impressive.  I wandered back into class looking at the clock.  It was 1:30 and Adriana was freaking out.  She called another grad student who teaches Italian, who said that she had nineteen students in class that day, which bewildered Adriana even more.  After she got off the phone she announced that we would wait a few minutes before going outside to make sure we picked up any stragglers before we left. 

  Before we left the classroom I expected that we would enter the hallway and Adriana would see the artful ploy Benito and the rest had played on her.  But oddly, no one was there.  I had no idea what was going on.  We strolled down the corridor toward the stairs, and as we walked onto the stairs I looked down an adjacent hallway to see the rest of the class hiding around the corner at the end of it.  After Adriana and the five of us whom she thought were the only ones to come to class entered the stairwell, the rest of the class crept after us.  We went downstairs and began walking across the main floor to the door.  Suddenly Adriana turned around and I froze, thinking she had seen them.  But she didn’t react at all so I guess they had remained hidden behind a corner.  Twelve or so people following a very small group of people at close distance without being discovered is not something I would bet on.

  We left the building and headed to the “numbers courtyard” to have class on the lawn there.  In Adriana’s mind, we would arrive there and have class.  Just her, and the five of us. 

  But outside we were in open range.  Any reason Adriana had for turning around would blow the whole thing.  The twelve or so other students were following at just about thirty feet behind us, creeping quietly along, but keeping up.  The numbers courtyard was only about 200 yards away, and once we were close enough we pointed out an open space by the 4 (a huge metal number on the ground) where we could settle and headed for it.  Amazingly, this entire time Adriana kept walking and looking straight ahead.

  In fact, once at the number, Adriana put all of her stuff on the giant 4 and kept looking in the direction we had been walking while she got all her stuff out.  In this time the rest of the class crept up—still ever so quietly for such a large group of people—and sat in a semi-circle around Adriana while she faced the other way.  There Adriana was, facing one way, getting out her lesson plans while having complete confidence that when she turned around the five students who showed up to class would be there waiting for the lesson.  This reality had been firmly implanted in her mind.  To Adriana, it was the way the world was.

  “Okay,” she says with an inflection signaling the start of class.  Then she turns around and—BAM!—her entire reality shatters instantly.  Her mouth drops.  Everyone immediately erupts in laughter.  At this point I had been itching for the moment.  The fact that we led her all the way outside under the pretense that there were only five of us, and that all twenty of us actually extemperaneously synchronized our understanding of the situation, and executed each of our duties to perfection, and that the main unknown variable, Adriana, did everything she needed to for it all to work, culminated in that glorious moment.  Her arms dropped as she started doing a resigned laugh, indicated by her bouncing shoulders.  She knew objectively it was a hilarious piece of artifice, but also the she was the one who had been had.  In her ever so helplessly pleasant voice she said, “I hate all of you!” 

  We all laughed for about a minute or so, releasing all the humor in the situation that had been built up inside us.  Reaching the plateau of a brilliant moment is hard enough work as it is, but add to it extemporaneity, that it was done communally, and the perfect incremental buildup to the one genius moment, and it becomes doubly as rare.  The whole thing took about fifteen minutes, during which time we were all mentally anticipating the one moment that Adriana would discover the chicanery that was at work only an eye glance away from her.  Like a glint of brilliance, a spike in the graph, a runaway from prison Normal, we all enjoyed the extraordinary moment together. 

  I am always excited when everyone can participate in something silly together, rather than the potential participants automatically assuming the crowd’s mentality of reverting to doing things the same way they are always done.  Such is a dull and unimaginative universe.  It is my desire that when someone at a formal breakfast picks up a piece of toast and says, “I would like to propose a toast,” that everyone grab their toasts and raise them together.

  In the flux of atmospheric thoughts that are all around us that indicate the way the mass of people normally think, you should be a spike in the graph, a mental aberration in the mental chain of thoughts people predicate their lives on, disrupting the reality of other people’s universes.   

  • 2:21 pm
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