It’s twenty to midnight and I cannot help plunging into an existential crisis, the kind you are far more prone to when it’s so quiet you can hear the fridge humming and the crickets outside. But it’s not the silence that’s killing me, its what’s sitting across from me on the couch….
Some may call it ‘child’s play’ but I wonder whether there is a level of skill you loose as you grow older. Not everything can get better, more sophisticated, and developed, can it?
I have to find some excuse or scientific explanation for the fact that I am an absolute failure at “Bop it”. As I desperately grab at the buttons on this battery operated children’s game I keep one ear cocked for any sounds of stirring from the kids I am babysitting. I have saved my tomfoolery for after I put them to bed, and thank god because my highest score seems to have stagnated on 9. Which makes me feel like a right twit when you put it into context - the young one now slumbering (in a room decorated with frog pictures) has his highest score set at 188.
This is not the first time this week I have felt less than brilliant. In fact my honours year so far seems to set my mood as a constant fluctuation between stress, despair, fascination, frustration and guilty relaxation. When I couldn’t complete a sudoku the mood-ometer plunged to record lows. This was magnified by the fact that a full grid would have resulted in a free drink care of Ecopsoc. Motivation, but still no cigar! How can I be expected to write a logical thesis if I cannot even complete a tiny square of logic??? Even the kid’s sudoku in the weekend paper was out of my league.
But this, this is worse. This is no sudoku. This machine that taunts at me to “twist it” and “flick it” is basically proving that my reflexes are twenty times slower than that of an eight year old. Why this becomes more important than three years of successful academic study in determining (in my mind) how capable I am of writing a thesis can only be explained by the irrationality of an honours student’s mind at the pumpkin hour.
Twenty minutes later and I am up to 26! As the mood-ometer slowly ascends I rejoice in the fact that at this rate, by the time the parents get home I may only be half as slow as their little baby! In the meantime my thesis remains neglected as I fight my childish inadequacy.