the habit of being

I signed up for what I thought was a contemporary art course, called “Art Now.” Having taken the elevator on the wrong side of the building, I got lost and came in late. There was a very long table set up, with about 12 students on either side. On one end, a gray-haired professor in a bowtie held a pipe he wasn’t smoking. On the other end, a scuffy middle-aged man sat with glossy eyes and a frayed red string around his wrist. The only empty seat was next to the string wrist guy, and I really started to get worried when he said “I bet some of you guys thought this class was really going to be about art, haha.”

Soon we were told that we needed to be sitting in a Magic Circle, which meant we had to back away from the table. Red string man grabbed the back of my chair for me and dragged me back toward the wall. His Ph.D., which he brought up about 4 times just in case we forgot he had one, was in shamanism.

After the Magic Circle was in order, we learned that the main project of the course was to write a MANIFESTO. The syllabus was a stream-of-consciousness rant about how to be a radical using as little punctuation as possible, and every time the MANIFESTO came up, it was in all capitals. The MANIFESTO was to cover the next ten years, basically, our vision for a utopian society, how we were going to change the world, etc. The first step was the turn out all the lights in the class room, meditate on our futures, and then go around the table sharing what came to mind.

A blonde girl named Aubrey, who had a lot of necklaces, said that in ten years she would star in a gritty character drama, with no action scenes, directed by Sofia Coppola. One boy was so full of himself in the past and present that he couldn’t quite imagine the future. He’s already written his Unauthorized Biography of Christina Aquilera, and now he is concentrating on a new project about the history of the metrosexual. At least three girls will be starting fashion lines. One boy will be writing an addendum to the Bible.

I said I’d be a mother, and the next day I dropped the class.