To be fair, I suppose he disappeared himself. His name was missing from his mailbox and the slot taped over. I had to check the facebook to figure out whose slot it was, but once I had a name and a face, it struck me that I hadn't seen anyone matching that description around in a while. If ever. Maybe he never registered in the first place . . . or maybe I've stumbled across the explanation for the email they sent out saying there was an open dorm room for the spring.
My overall feeling at this discovery is a sort of nverous apprehension, of the sort the characters in horror movies start to feel as they realize what sort of movie they're in. You know, after the first minor character has disappeared but before the body turns up.
I see the world almost exclusively in terms of metaphors, it should be noted. My technique of dealing with a tough concept or a new situation is to find some concept with a parallel internal structure and see if the analogy holds. The more outrageous the metaphor, the better. Harder to forget.
So, if law school is a horror movie, it's also a kung-fu movie, in which we're the bad guys. The Socratic method is a way for the professors take us on one at a time. Even though our combined ideas are enough to thoroughly deconstruct the professor's pet theory, we wind up taking them on one at a time. Between cutting people off before they've completed their thoughts, mischaracterizing their positions, avoiding obvious connections between different people's ideas, and other tricks of equivocation, the bullies behind the lecterns wind up winning every time.
Well, okay. So it's the most enjoyable bullying to which I've ever been subjected. But not everyone reacts the same way to it. One of my classmates stormed out of the class at the break after a particularly egregious incident of being misquoted; I know everyone here feels a bit of that anger from time to time.
I wonder if maybe it was the manipulation-as-education that got to our former colleague.