today was a pretty strange day. i woke up in time to go to my math analysis class, which i've skipped (slept through) for the last 2.5 weeks. in fact, i got less than 12 hours of sleep last night, which is also pretty strange. i ate breakfast. i got in the car with Jon to go sign our lease renewal. upon returning to the car, some of my CDs, my calculator (hardly used anymore), and my CD player were stolen, as were Jon's bag and cell phone. all told, the stuff wasn't worth all that much in monetary value, but to us it was pretty valuable. how can you put a monetary value on a set of notes for a lab practical ?
all for the want of a couple of locked doors and a raised car window. and now the dilemmas truly begin.
i mean, apart from the ethical problems when the police officer was interrogating and searching the only two witnesses, a couple of black high school kids who were sitting in a nearby car smoking cigarettes. the officer said they knew the ropes re personal searches and drug locations, but they were clean (and man did i feel like the rich white prick seeing them get searched). and the kicker is that Jon and i are pretty sure the stuff was in their car, based on some stuff they said. thanks be to the Constitution, though (and i am not joking) : we couldn't search their car without probable cause. how does race play a role ? should it ?
so i missed my analysis class (oh well, haven't been to it in a while anyway) and instead have passed the morning talking to a police officer and reading some of Saussure's Course in General Linguistics. but any intellectual effort, it seems, gets undermined pretty quickly by ethical bubblings and regurgitations ... i have money, so why would i feel bad if i just went out and bought new CD's and a new player ? shouldn't i have the right to leave my car alone, not secured, for 15 minutes without fear that my earthly possessions will disappear ? why do people steal, and why is stealing even a concept in our society ? and who was it that made me white, a member of the middle class, and american ? i suppose fair is only a relative term, but i'm having a hard time sorting out why it's right that i should have resources while others do without, and why i feel that it's right for me to keep my resources while others do without.
it's difficult to deal with all this, especially at the end of the semester (when all my procrastination catches up with me). but if not now, when ? i'll always have other stuff to do. i have to make time to deal with things that don't take their time directly from me. but where to start ...
[a couple hours later ...]
you know, like most stuff, i guess the events from this morning got a little blown out of wack. not that i didn't feel shitty from the whole sequence of happenings, but i think i probably made too much out of the whole theft/race thing. after all, we were at a high school in a reasonably sized city. what should we expect, i suppose ? still, i think that's a sad way of looking at it. the long and short of it is that now i'm about 3 CDs short of where i was yesterday (not counting CDs that i'll have to recover from MP3 files on my computer—thank goodness for CD rippers), and other than that my life is pretty much the same. is there meaning in any of this ? it's hard to tell ; everything seems pretty distorted at this hour of the night. time for bed.
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