Pop Quiz!

"May cause drowsiness and dizziness. May cause headache. If it upsets your stomach, take with a modest meal, crackers or bread."

The preceding was a warning for:
A) users of Vicodin
B) readers of Sartre's Nausea
C) a & b

If you answered:
A) it's rather fortunate that you've never been B
B) it's rather unfortunate that you've never been A
C) let's commiserate

In retrospect, I probably should have stayed home last Monday evening and done something productive like read Nausea, organize my sock drawer, or finally learn how to knit. Instead I took my friend's $6,000 downhill mountain bicycle down two flights of stairs and landed on my face.

The upside of being temporarily incapacitated, bedridden and forced to drink Ensure milkshakes for every meal is that all your time becomes free-time. So me and my new post-structuralist face picked up Nausea again.

Theoretically, I should love it. Well, based on a faulty syllogism, I should love it:

1. If de Beauvoir and I have the same birthday, and
2. de Beauvoir loved Sartre,
3. I should love Sarte

We won't discuss the faulty assumptions on which the syllogism is grounded (astrology, reincarnation, de Beauvoir and I as kindred spirits), all I know is that I don't love it.

Perhaps its because summer vacation provided me a much needed break from a three-month-long friendship with a disciple of the principles taught in David Curry's Existentialism and Phenomenology course who saw every social gathering as an opportunity to have an audible existential crisis peppered with references to Evan Almighty, misinterpreted Catholic dogma and The Smiths lyrics.

The tedium of that last sentence was crafted as an illustration of the heaviness of said friendship and as a segue to my next point: Sartre is tedious.

It's rather unfortunate because the introduction to my version by Hayden Carruth was so promising, rationalizing the flourishing of existentialism in post-war America, et cetera, et cetera.

But so far, it's kind of annoying. It reads like Catcher in the Rye's Holden Caulfield grew up, got a Ph.D., expatriated to France but never escaped the "post-modern condition."

But who knows? I'm only halfway through so maybe I'll end up liking it. I do find myself (annoyingly) identifying with it. Satre creates a really dynamic protagonist and does a bang-up job of characterizing what it's like to live in one's head all the time.

Plus, de Beauvoir and I have the same birthday.