Siuuu

Diary Entry: March 12, 2025

Today was aggressively uneventful. The kind of day that seems determined to be average, as if it’s trying to make a statement about the futility of expecting otherwise. Except there was… a moment. A fracture in the ordinary.

In the early morning quiet, I killed time scrolling through Instagram, past the usual parade of carefully arranged pictures. There, amidst the usual detritus, was the inescapable evidence of a peculiar cultural shift: my feed had become saturated with the green pitch and fluid motion of football. A strange reversal, I thought. When Pelé arrived in the America of the 1970s, a prophet sent to convert the New World, the expectation was a swift flowering of the global game; instead, decades of barren soil followed, the seeds refusing to take. America, it seemed, was content to erect its own sporting pantheon — a trinity of baseball, basketball, and its own brutalist version of football — each a buttress for the fortress of national identity they so prized. Their rejection was so complete they had to strip the sport of its very name, rebranding it with the flat, artless diminutive soccer. Yet the algorithm doesn’t lie, and things were clearly changing. Maybe they were finally ready to come around, to get rid of a name that had brought them neither luck nor success. It was inevitable, I supposed; after all, football is the only sport the whole world truly shares.

Snapping the phone shut on this minor anthropological query, I left for the university, losing myself in the anonymous drift of its corridors until my classes began. I was in the first-floor restroom, the one whose air hangs heavy with the olfactory ghost of lemon disinfectant mingling with a scent I can only describe as institutional despair. I was washing my hands. The sinks, I should note, are on the right — a crucial detail for the record, should pilgrim readers one day wish to retrace the hallowed footsteps.

The door opened. A presence entered. I maintained my focus on the basin. Public restrooms, I have learned, are theaters of discretion. Then, a sound — not a footstep, but the compressed squeak of a sneaker sole gripping and releasing the linoleum in a fraction of a second. From the corner of my eye, a man erupted into motion. He did not step so much as launch, executing a crisp, mid-air pirouette before landing with the weightless precision of a contract assassin from a movie that got terrible reviews. His target: the paper towel dispenser. He plucked two sheets, performed an encore of his spin — a flourish suggesting this was not a debut performance — and vanished, leaving only the swinging door to mark his passage.

I had caught him only with my peripheral vision which, while unreliable in matters of nuance, is quite adept at detecting airborne academics. But did he know I was there? Did he know me? If so, the question left me stranded at a logical fork, with only two competing hypotheses: either he adhered to a code of silence so absolute it covered even acts of spontaneous ballet, or he was in the early stages of training for a paper towel–based heist and required no witnesses.

The motion was pure celebrity, an explosion of athletic theatre. It was as if Cristiano Ronaldo had materialized simply to execute a maneuver somewhere between a footballer’s goal celebration and the frantic audition of an amateur ninja.  Only in the silent, dripping aftermath did recognition dawn, and with it, a thought so spectacularly heretical it felt like a trespass. The absurd vision didn’t just take hold; it erupted, displacing the mundane reality of the restroom. Gone was the linoleum, replaced by the floodlit green of a Champions League final pitch. And there he was — Professor Pigou — having just scored the winning goal, arms thrown wide as he launched into that iconic, world-shaking “Siuuu” celebration. A laughable proposition for the current model — a man of considerable academic wattage and a commensurate number of orbits around the sun — but for a younger version? Reality is far more permissive than we dare to imagine.

I remained there, moored to the linoleum by a cocktail of astonishment and analytical confusion, wholly uncertain of the proper protocol. Should one laugh? Offer commentary? File a report on the unauthorized aerial retrieval of university property? In the end, it hardly matters. We will, I am certain, make eye contact in a hall of the college or a seminar one day, and in that silent, flickering moment, I will pretend nothing ever happened, because he can never prove anything. He got nothing.