Not having written in days, I resumed tonight. Although, as usual I offer nothing dissimilar to what I have written previously, a coarse encapsulation of my colorless and slothful life.
My cold from days ago is recovering gradually. The symptoms had first exacerbated and then alleviated, like now - I don't feel anything special except for a slight itchiness down the throat that mysteriously makes my voice sound sexier - according to Varun, now I sound like a folk singer. I take pride in such a fact, and indeed become visibly more talkative during dinner - we, or more precisely, I, have dined on the table at the far end, outside of the cafeteria, for the first time since the months after orientation week. We said various interesting things which are only interesting contextually - they are only fun in this particular time period when everybody has a desire to be entertained, and among a particular group of people, Dinner Squad and Alee, to whom I said some fabricated Urdu language that actually translates to "fart". The only lackluster bit is that my girlfriend Winnie didn't show up. She got infected by me and is currently on the symptom-exacerbation stage of her cold. She did pass by me, on her way to the Water class which she takes because it's purportedly easy. She saw me, laughing wildly with my friends, and I didn't see her. For her dinner, I brought her two slices of chicken burger meat, without bread due to my own personal preference, boiled potatoes, which she didn't at all touch, and sweet potato fries, which she has finished eating, contained in a small saucer. And I have been playing Battlefield 4 ever since I came back.
Yesterday evening, I made a Facebook group called "Schmidtmann Squad", of which I, Husain, Atabak and Varun are members. It came into existence primarily because I thought I need a doctor to address all the deteriorated conditions that arise from my sub-par lifestyle, and Husain assumes and fears that his heart is having a problem, and Atabak and Varun missed their, respectively, German A1.2 quiz and General Logistics II midterm, and they need a doctor's note, which Dr. Schmidtmann pre-signs and hands out to students on demand. It's a wonderfully tacit collusion between us university students and Schmidtmann in that we get to skip anything we want, and he gets to have more patient records. Or I'm not entirely sure. It might also be that the old-enough doctor is a kind-enough man to be willing to temporarily shelter us from the troubles of the academia. And I sent via group chat a message to tell Husain to wake me up in the morning so we can got to the doctor's together. Husain didn't go because those symptoms are mild and disappear in the morning, and I was just too lazy to crawl out of my bed. The other two successfully obtained their medical excuses, albeit the fact that the real patients didn't go.
After a few hours, Rai and Varun came by knocking. Then Husain has gone down for lunch and I didn't answer the door. For I, factually, don't want to help Rai with his academic probation - I'm unwilling to deceit the professor into thinking that he has actually contributed to our group presentation, simply because he failed all the courses he's taken last semester and Society and Economy is the only course whose professor is willing to change the grade for him. Varun almost had an argument with me because I didn't open the door. And Jacob thought the same like I do and didn't go.
Having written thus long, I noticed that I fill up space with structurally insignificant things like names. And indeed there are a lot of names here, all of which I'm acquainted with and genuinely felt. I also realized, as a disturbing epiphany of an eventual riddance, however, that one of the names what appear frequently now is going to be less so into the future, probably after the day when I take the flight back to China - Husain, third-year GEM student, is graduating at the end of this semester. And as his graduation day approaches, his departure feels more irreversibly looming. When I talked to him, I can sense behind his usually sense of Husain-style humor, a kind of wane, and a kind of tiredness of having dealt with us, and having to not be able to deal with us in the future. And instead of accepting my proposal of continuing to live with us in the spare room from me and Winnie, he decides to live in Oldenburg, a nearby city, with his old friends that he had known during his time in Iran. I guess he must leave because it is simply too dreadful an experience for him to go through all the past four years by himself, and that such dreadfulness, as is testified by his decision to live in Oldenburg, outweighs whatever the so-called friendship, the so-called Dinner-Squad family style can offer. Indeed, even to me, when I'm a young, immature first year student effectively shielded from the reality of settling in the society, sometimes feel friendships are shallow, not because any of the friends involved doesn't want them to endure, it's simply that grand reality is too empowered that we have to envisage it to be able to survive, and ultimately, to move on.
