May 20, 2016

A projector was displaying a film on the wall about a man navigating through the afterlife. He is greeted by someone who claims to be the devil and proves it by pulling things out of an empty cloth bag. The man is unconvinced as he walks away and when he peers around the corner, we see a long hallway that is lit up from heaven at the other end.

After walking out of the theater, I sat in on a conversation between a classmate and an older man. They mentioned that over the summer they were going to tutor kids with autism. The conversation later switched to the new developments on campus for the next year, particularly the fact that one of the buildings was going to be decommissioned. We agreed that it was going to be weird but also kind of nice having an empty building. Someone else was talking about how by the end of their anthropology course, they hated pot-making and that they were able to tell you everything about clay.

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Everyone in class was handed an assortment of small colored plastic pieces. We would take turns throwing these pieces into the center of the room before performing its associated task. For example, after throwing a red ball you had to describe the shape and size of something in the middle of the room while throwing a yellow one you had to identify the song that was playing. Finally, after throwing a blue ball, you had to select a person in the room to switch positions with. Each of these pairs were written on the board but I had great difficulty with trying to read the directions and also had trouble remembering what was what. Apparently there was another rule where we couldn’t throw something that the previous people had thrown, meaning that eventually all of the colors will show up in the middle. We played this game for several iterations, each time adding a new piece/task pair.

Someone threw a blue piece but for some reason this time everyone got up and started moving around. I asked the teacher why this was happening and he simply replied “who knows”. It seemed like he welcomed the fact that we were changing the rules of the game however we saw fit.

It was soon my turn to do something and I was still struggling with trying to identify which activity went with which block. A purple block was recently added and I recalled that its associated task was to be “dynamic”. I reasoned that the embarrassment associated with bringing attention to myself was considerably less than forgetting what I was supposed to do so I chose to throw a purple block shaped like a Hershey’s kiss. Except it wasn’t really quite purple: half of it was purple while the remaining two quarters were red and blue. But it didn’t matter, I intended to throw purple and so I did so before striking a pose.