I've been doing some thinking...

... maybe as a way of trying to break out of the math that we all keep doing every day for hours on end, or maybe because you can stop taking history classes, but you can never stop taking history. Or at least something like that--that little piece of prose took a good ten minutes and still didn't turn out right, but I'm not about to erase it all now--the point is that I've done a bunch of thinking about things, and then last night I did a bunch of writing about things, but it was too much to put in one place. I mean, it was long enough that if a friend wrote it, I wouldn't be able to finish it, so I figure it's better to assume your audience has an attention span comparable to your own and break the thing up a bit. (Unlike the last two sentences, which felt a little long, but, again, too much math makes those language skills rusty, hence my panicky return to writing.) Anyway, without further ado, the stuff I was thinking:

I think I’ve come to realize that, really, most of what I’m talking about isn’t funny in the normal sense of the word. I mean, the reverse of what I’m doing would be to laugh about how American students don’t capitalize anything they type on IM or maybe how many Americans have strong feelings about the football teams of colleges which they have never visited or even watched play a complete game on tv or something. It's kind of funny, but may be more coping-mechanism funny for me than hilarious-funny for everyone else.

So, yeah. Calling these sorts of cultural idiosyncrasies “funny” is misleading, and I would almost venture to say that claiming things about Budapest are worth being laughed at demeans them. Instead, I’d like to try out the word “absurd,” in the way those 60s French intellectuals used it. In fact, although my memory is a little fuzzy on the subject (sorry Prof. Wilder, but I either didn’t read or didn’t understand most of that section of your otherwise enjoyable and accessible course), I’m pretty sure that this is precisely the sort of thing “absurd” was chosen to describe—it was an intellectual way of escaping the contradictions and asymmetries of a country modernizing both culturally and economically at an uncomfortable pace, which I would call a decent assessment of how things are right now in the former Soviet satellite state of Hungary. Alright, so now everything--police in hatchbacks, night buses, broken English t-shirts, everything--is absurd. We can still laugh--and I certainly do—but now we can do so with some sort of postmodern self-awareness that we are, in fact, laughing the way modern culture is fragile, dynamic, tragic, and intimidating, but far from monolithic. But that’s enough long, vague words for one day. I think I'll be happy about the humusz I had for lunch, and get crackin' on some of that Galois Theory. Helo!

Sam

ps: as it turns out, even though supposedly interchangeable, "szia" is generally used for salutation, whereas "helo" is a farewell, possibly a little way Hungary subverted its own assimilation of English words