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Refuge for the rational.
Monday, August 16, 2004
Daydreaming When One Should Be Writing Term Papers is Bad
I wrote an in-class essay the other day. I got it back and there was a big red A+ on it accompanied by an exclamation mark. I don't think I've ever had a perfect score on a test before and considering I spent the night before the exam fooling around downtown and intermittently pretending to study, I was a little shocked. My first reaction, of course, was to grin obnoxiously all day, tell everyone about it (with considerable ceremony) and give myself the title of 'genius' (which I still proudly claim, if truth be told). But, on re-examination I realised that this means I need to do some reorganizing in terms of the way I think about what I'm going to do with the rest of my life. The reason for this is that it seems I've lost some of my zeal and respect for the institution of academia. This experience has also left me feeling like one of those irritating people who think they know everything, even though I'm painfully trying not to let it show. For instance, at this very moment I'm writing an essay on discourse. It's called 'the Discourse of Marginalization', and every time I write a particularly effective sentence, I catch myself laughing out loud. It's literally just a brief "HaHa", but confidence is preferable to egomania and I know if I witnessed someone else doing this very thing I would likely roll my eyes.
This combines with another aspect of school that has been getting me down lately. The school clones, and especially in this class (a gender class), the women who have something to prove. The prospect of going to school was exciting to me precisely because I thought I would be interacting with intelligent people with interesting things to say and original ways of saying them. Instead, all I've encountered are people who are painfully adaptable and write papers consisting of facts they pulled off the internet and quotes from dead guys. Formulaic is perhaps a better word. I'm at a loss, I don't want to master the world of the academic anymore.
Not that I was ever going to in the first place. Drama isn't really considered an 'academic' subject and most people in my classes look at me funny when I tell them my intended major. I suppose it is strange to jump through the prerequisite hoops in order to take a third year anthropology course when it hasn't anything to do with your subject of choice. But, I believe in enjoying the subject matter and I don't really care if I get a degree at the end of this or not.
It's looking like I won't. I'm exasperated and I want to spend my days writing and my nights sleeping with handsome young men. And, I want to travel. So, I've decided that I'm going to save up some money to go to Montreal. When I get to Montreal, I'm going to save up some money and go somewhere else and continue this nomadic pattern indefinitely; or, until I find a group of people who I love and who love me and who together resemble a sort of Woolf-Hemingway-Fitzgerald-esque lost generation. Yes, absinthe in Parisian squares.
This combines with another aspect of school that has been getting me down lately. The school clones, and especially in this class (a gender class), the women who have something to prove. The prospect of going to school was exciting to me precisely because I thought I would be interacting with intelligent people with interesting things to say and original ways of saying them. Instead, all I've encountered are people who are painfully adaptable and write papers consisting of facts they pulled off the internet and quotes from dead guys. Formulaic is perhaps a better word. I'm at a loss, I don't want to master the world of the academic anymore.
Not that I was ever going to in the first place. Drama isn't really considered an 'academic' subject and most people in my classes look at me funny when I tell them my intended major. I suppose it is strange to jump through the prerequisite hoops in order to take a third year anthropology course when it hasn't anything to do with your subject of choice. But, I believe in enjoying the subject matter and I don't really care if I get a degree at the end of this or not.
It's looking like I won't. I'm exasperated and I want to spend my days writing and my nights sleeping with handsome young men. And, I want to travel. So, I've decided that I'm going to save up some money to go to Montreal. When I get to Montreal, I'm going to save up some money and go somewhere else and continue this nomadic pattern indefinitely; or, until I find a group of people who I love and who love me and who together resemble a sort of Woolf-Hemingway-Fitzgerald-esque lost generation. Yes, absinthe in Parisian squares.
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