Just Like Everyone Else

While Samantha was keeping her neighborhood safe for posterity, I was in graduate school at an unnamed university, getting a Ph.D. in a ridiculously useless field. At the time, I did not know this was a useless field; I was convinced that everyone cared deeply about post-colonial discursive practices, narrative desire in the novels of Balzac, and semantic instability in Herman Melville's Billy Budd. Why wouldn't I think so, when all my other grad student friends who lived in under-furnished apartments with cats and ethnic art on the walls and terrorized naive undergrads in discussion sections were convinced that we were all doing something urgently meaningful?

It did not occur to me until later -- much, much later, after I had two children and couldn't get a teaching job to save my life -- that there was a whole world out there where people did not give a rat's patootie about Lacan's Mirror Stage or Heidegger's inscrutable rants or Adorno's Marxist tirades, that what we were all doing was nothing if not some big-time collective navel-gazing. But my funny friend Lawrence, the one with the mind and the sense of humor of a 15-year-old boy, the one who had stolen my desk copy of Boccaccio's Decameron and inscribed "To my good friend Samantha, From G. Boccaccio" in red ballpoint pen on the fly-leaf, he knew. He was not taken in at all, and when a major superstar in critical studies who happened to be a good friend of the professor paid a visit to his theory seminar, Lawrence knew what was really important. During break, he went to use the restroom and found himself hip to hip, as it were, with the great man himself. As soon as the seminar was over, Lawrence sprinted to the room where the teaching assistants congregated and breathlessly announced to his rapt audience that he had just been to the restroom with the great man, and -- well, we wouldn't believe this, but... the great man tinkles just like everyone else.

We should all be so grounded. Or at least be friends with grounded people who pay attention to what goes on in restrooms at major universities and are willing to share that information with others.