Personal Goals

I just got back from an evening of sitting in an overpriced German-themed bar-thing (Beir Haus), with various other American students and some Russian friends of theirs, and listening to a “jazz band” basically play elevator music. It was not the world’s best entertainment except that there was this Russian girl there who told me, very seriously, that her life’s work is demonstrating to people that the music of Queen is serious poetry with deep spiritual meaning, only dismissed as silly or eccentric for its own sake by those who have not done enough research, listened carefully enough, or met this girl to have it explained to them. She is currently engaged in some earnest, ambitious project to create singable Russian translations of all Queen’s songs; she pulled out various liner notes in protective plastic sleeves, as well as print-outs of various inferior translations found on the internet, and asked us to help her translate various enigmatic phrases such as “they turned the milk into sour like the blue in the blood in my veins.” She was never happy with a direct translation and a “well, this doesn’t really make sense in English either,” and it was hard to disappoint her entreating eyes, begging for a cultural or linguistic insight into the genius of “Frank,” so I can safely say that have never before in my life spent so much time trying to come up with a cultural history of the word “ogre.” Or listened to such an enthusiastic account of the cosmology of Zoroastrianism: this girl had apparently spent hours reading about Zoroastrianism and Christianity, so as to better understand Frank’s two main religious influences. This whole venture of placating her need to find meaning in the plastic-sleeved liner notes became much easier when it became clear that she is one of those people who think of the Bible on the same level of hip-ness as recording rural oral history and meditating with Tibetan lamas. I highly approve of this particular result of post-modernism; my interestingness-level is instantly increased. It wasn’t even necessary, very often, to break my recent pledge to desist from intellectual posing; I didn’t really have to be more informed or original than I am, I just had to say things like “um, yeah, that’s in the book of Isaiah.” Which would lead Yulia rushing off on some rapturous tangent about Frank’s genius in employing cultural prototypes or something, as well as highly dubious transformations of the song verse into coherent philosophical comment. Here is an interesting fact for you: did you know that the location of Mozart’s body is unknown, and the burial-place of this Queen singer whom I spent the evening discussion but whose name I don’t actually know other that ‘Frank’ is also unknown? Coincidence? Yulia thinks not. This experience has led me to rethink slightly my desire to have a firmly held, clearly formulated goal in life. True, it would make various life decisions easier, and I would feel like a more useful member of society if I felt that I was going to contribute to it at some point, but what if my firmly held, clearly formulated goal were “convincing the world to take Queen seriously”?