GUEST COLUMN: "An out-of-body experience

Experiencing Nathan Smith's life,Experiencing Nathan Smith's life,you would take time to smell theExperiencing Nathan Smith's life,you would take time to smell theflowers and appreciate the day. Experiencing Nathan Smith's life,you would take time to smell theflowers and appreciate the day.Today you wake up in my bed. The sun is peeking out from the window of a neighboring rowhouse, and its slanted beams cut into your thin-skinned eyelids. Showered, shaved and strong you stand flipping flapjacks in your tiny kitchen. You wonder how many Yankees know the Southern secret, that sour milk makes sweeter cakes. Vainly you wish you were the only one, because exclusive knowledge is a form of power, even if it only extends to your frying pan. So you stuff your stack, grab your pack and head out for campus. Half a block down you spy a patch of daffodils. You pluck one for your pleasure, apologizing not to the gardener but to the gentle flower itself. After all, no one really "owns" any living thing. In a cold snap, the gardener has no right to tell them not to die. The flower tussles limply about as you alternately smell it and finger its petals. Such a simple little beauty brings a smile to your face, and you suddenly become aware that passersby -- those few Philadelphians who still notice their surroundings -- are wary of your morning's euphoria. Surely they consider it drug-induced, for who in this city can just smile at a flower? You feel like a goof for doing so, but you just can't stop yourself from soaking in the ebbing life of the daffodil as you head to work. Outside the door, you stuff the flower in today's book. Hours zip by at the library, where you work on your taxes or your financial aid forms, occasionally interrupted to check out a book for someone. "Hey, wake up, you're at work, remember?" At last one o'clock rolls around; you're free to eat. Stop at the truck of today's fancy (perhaps a huge fruit salad on this sunny afternoon) and then head to College Green. Luxuriating in your two-hour lunch break (the envy of all your other working friends who have but one hour to stuff themselves and go groggily back to their desks), finger Foucault and the blackening flower pressed within. Something about his fatalistic philosophy bugs you this afternoon, and soon enough you are idly watching students changing classes. Or perhaps you are riveted to the woman dancing with her flags, screaming about skin cancer and the freedom of drug use. Something occurs to you, something about insanity, but you can't quite put it in words. You only know that you value that lady and her welcome disruption in this "scholarly" atmosphere. She keeps us from taking ourselves too seriously, from forgetting that the entire human race only pretends sophistication when deep down we're all dying to go berserk. She yells another incomprehensible slogan, forcing everyone to realize that some of us don't bother with pretending. Rolling onto your back, humming D'Angelo, you ponder lost loves or new ones unrequited, and you wonder if you care. Does love mean anything more than deceiving one's self? Is it a hollow ritual, worshipping a long-dead goddess whose name you can't remember? You were raised on sitcom love stories, after all, and when you've heard enough stories it's hard to tell what's real anymore. Smiling, you turn off that rutted road to find something new to think about for once. You recall your friend in crisis. Remember his tears on your shoulder? You wish you had had anything to offer. You gave him words of reassurance, hugs to prove that warmth lives on in his world, jokes that so easily bring laughter out of sobbing, and beers of bonding you were careful not to drink until the light returned to his eyes. But deep down you know he still lies in bed thinking of her, and the man she's with now, and cries a little. You tried to be his amnesia. You even made him laugh by offering to beat him over the head with a blunt instrument, if it would help him forget. But sometimes you give your all and it's still not enough, and you find yourself thinking again of love and lovelessness, both his and yours. I'm going out of my mind, my oh my, me and those dreaming eyes of mine? Soon enough you're back at work, waiting out the end of your shift, trying and failing to wait more than 30 seconds between glances at the clock. Pray for distraction, for some sudden work rush. Whether it arrives or not, five o'clock inevitably rolls around. Freedom! Sort of. Freedom to go to Van Pelt and make up for your lunch break wasted in reverie. You plow through a hundred pages or so, changing books every once in a while because it's the literary equivalent of channel surfing; before you even reached six years of age your attention span was corrupted by remote control. Eyes bleary, brain weary, you suddenly realize you've been sitting in the same carrel for four hours. You're dead tired and you need dinner. The city is another land at night, and you too have changed. Where went the flower-sniffing early bird, smiling radiantly over nothing in particular? Buried somewhere inside this weary shell, tired, a little cold and hungry for a finale to the day? Home again, you throw together whatever random ingredients linger in your barren refrigerator and by some stretch of the imagination call it a meal. Wrapped up in your bed you read that last chapter, squeezing the last breath of achievement out of your waking hours.The words blur, your thoughts wander and with a flip of the switch the world is once again in darkness. Thoughts crash like waves across your tired mind, swirling in ebbs and flows, never congealing into realization. The phase of faking it passes, and the falling feeling takes over. In a last gasp of coherence you wonder, "Is every life as strange and wonderful, simple and wild, boring and hard as this one?"