Stethoscopes, Compilers and Hemingway: Dim Meta Writing

Opinion by Aaditya Shidham
Oct. 11, 2010, 12:25 a.m.

Stethoscopes, Compilers and Hemingway: Dim Meta WritingCaution—for the next half-dozen paragraphs, you may find half-baked writing. That’s right kids—this week’s installment is worse than usual! Why? It’s an experiment to write about the writing process. I have spent some time thinking about what I will write about, but the actual text that follows this paragraph comes naked—an unfiltered dump from the thoughts of my mind to the letters you see before you. I will do little editing to the sentences that follow this paragraph, other than those obvious mistakes of grammar or spelling. Hopefully, you readers will make sense of the nonsensical, and send me your thoughts.

When I was a kid, I imagined that I could fly and, in mid-flight, freeze time with my very will. I imagined that I could drop to the ground, stare at a person in the middle of a conversation, mid-word, and appreciate his or her entire life through that look. I imagined myself with blue flannel pajamas, no glasses—I finally had 20/20 vision—and swimming fins, because I could also go underwater mid-flight and stare at fish in mid-gaze as well.

That is a story I like to tell about the dreams about my youth. The following is not.

As a more devout Hindu back then, I also imagined that I was reincarnated—and I remember vividly having a dream that laid out for me utter, undeniable empirical proof that I was a gay, blind penguin swimming alone in the depths of the Antarctic seas (Side note: does Antarctica even have seas? What are they called if they aren’t seas then? Is there a difference between a sea and an ocean?). I woke up with sweaty palms and a yelp.

I know—why may you care about the useless dreams of my past? That’s right—I didn’t think you did. Isn’t it annoying when someone else tells you something that personal? Yes? OK, good. Let me tell you some more things that feed my narcissism. You are free to stop reading anytime.

This is my duality—very hard, witty, sarcastic on the outside, and soft like a mellow, castrated bumblebee on the inside. (Another side note: again, castration here is not a reference to genitalia at all. I think castration is the best word to describe what happens to the last horrible hours of a bumblebee’s life when their intestines and stinger are ripped out of them all at once. Stop reading now, and give thanks that you are not a bee.)

Now for more wittiness: look down at this column. Now look up. No? How about this? Coco is a horrible nickname for Conan O’Brien. It sounds so effeminate and passive—so wait, never mind…

Why is the sky blue? And why aren’t more people from Stanford on Reddit? Does anyone else secretly hate the Class of 2014? What assholes—younger, better-looking, more accomplished. And now they live in a room where I once vomited. It is probably the most explicit example of the young pushing out the old. It makes me think of when my own children will push me into a nursing home. Yes, that’s right—Crothers is the nursing home in the Stanford housing hierarchy! Huzzah!

I think that the best window for work is 20-minute chunks. Some people say that this is too short for most genius Stanford students. My opinion? It’s enough time for me to do genius work…so there. I must have turned back and forth from the same problem set 15 times this weekend. Its challenges never forced me to question my own life choices, or consider the utterly illogical teaching choices of certain unnamed Stanford departments of science and engineering, or question my own validity in the class and mourn the passing of the drop deadline. No—I got my work done with little stress, and lots of learning and creation packed in little, cute packets of joy—no, not joy, more like packets of red chili peppers. Sadistic joy, I guess.

You know what I want sometimes? I want to sit at the end of a bar and have an old white geezer with a top hat laugh at my stupid jokes all day. I want him to follow me around on the streets of New York, down major thoroughfares, and just laugh so hard that sometimes he will seem like he is going to have a heart attack. I will feed him with money and food. That is all.

See? I have waxed ironic, academic, poetic and just plain stupid in one swell rush of my pen. I wrote this way this week only because I wanted to hear from my readers. So please, readers, tell me what you think. How did my experiment in creative writing go? Does it look good naked?

Please do write! I want to read. Drop me a line at [email protected].

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