nektros - Cynicism in a Hot Dish

Stupid mistakes coated with a blinding sheen of immaturity are an inevitable part of youth. The difference in the particular case which had attracted Tanya’s spite was that my stupidity had fallen on the wrong side of malicious, careening into a pit of downright contemptuousness for growing right the hell up.

The crowd was – as is only possible for the main lobby of a university in the throes of midday break – packed to the point of seducing a tantrum out of the most stalwart claustrophobic. Reaching the apex of the throng and preparing to enter the library by way of converting the books in my arms into flying battering rams, my jugular-targeting plans died in my head as they were overtaken by something else.

A few weekends back, milling around a ferry terminal as the preordained quota of swear words beggared by all forms of public transport reached its daily limit, I recognised a girl disembarking from the most recently docked hell boat.

She had belonged to a high-visibility group in high school, while I had remained comfortable in a no-visibility one. She hadn’t come across my radar in four years, much less spoken to me during the six preceding ones.

Watching the new edition of Gladiators on TV a couple of days ago, I came to realise it might be possible to develop an idiot box-induced nostalgia complex.

There are three stages of nostalgia: kiddiestalgia, adultstalgia, and the strange, in-between cousin of the wistfully inclined, adolstalgia.