Nerve Endings Firing Away

Memories are the closest that come to assuming a deep mysterious and often ambiguous hue. Man has advanced manifold in technologically, socially, and economically terms but the mysteries of his own brain are still largely unknown. Even the old Bollywood movies would depict a flashback as a hazy blurring of vision and Christopher Nolan’s & Charlie Kaufman’s ground-breaking movie, Memento gave the perfect example of the non-linear nature of our own memories.

I was reminded of my own rapidly depleting neurons recently; sadly nerve endings do not fire that great anymore. These days, I am busy with a directed readings course with a professor. Aside from trying to wrap my head around complex epistemologies and theoretical foundations of planning literature, I am expected to chew through more than 300 pages of dense reading material. This is in addition to other academic and professional responsibilities that makes me wonder why the hell am I even writing this. To give you a rough idea, I carry my readings, photocopied notes and books in a big plastic box [thanks to the generosity of the aforementioned professor] in the trunk of my car.

Now, I was trying to locate a certain reading, Paris and Reynolds’ The Logic of Policy Inquiry, if you must know, to pen an essay on applying critical theory to planning literature. I dug through my box and it isn’t as large as it sounds, at least not big enough to lose a reading. I looked in other places that I may have accidentally kept it although knowing me that was highly unlikely. Finally, I gave up and completed my essay without that reading. After emailing the essay to my professor, I returned to my car and opened the trunk to keep the other readings back. I opened the box to keep the rest of the stuff back and there it was, the missing reading. I swear I couldn’t have missed it when I looked earlier. It was freaky enough to think that someone might have been just waiting for me to finish up my essay to put the reading back in the box.

Although supernatural explanations seem tempting, I bet my mind simply refused to see the reading when I was looking for it earlier; reasons for which I am completely ignorant of. Call it a temporary lapse of memory or simply selective impairment of visual neurons.

Why am I sharing this with you? Frankly, because I am left with little to write these days apart from sharing my inane reviews of otherwise remarkable movies [see sidebar] that I have managed to watch in spite of my schedule. Expect such insignificant ramblings in the near future; fortunately like everything else, this shall too pass.

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