Scream your head off for the sake of screaming more

So I'm sitting on campus, being one of the self important dickheads eating up time on one of the library computers doing something completely unrelated to academia in any shape or form. I used to get really pissed when I watched people doing dumb shit on the computer when my laptop was broken at the beginning of the year, and right now, considering all of the computers are full, I'm fairly certain there is someone eyeing me with disdain because I'm sitting here cranking out a completely irrelevant and vapidly self-aware ironic-sort of intro to an unotherwise unrelated blog. In fact, that big block of text is arguably one of the most pointless excercises in wordy pretention that I think I've ever written. The only thing I can think of that was probably wordier and said less was my entire final paper for my Comp 2 class in college.

In fact, I'm fairly certain that paper could act as a metaphor for my entire academic career post-junior year of high school. Literally, I had known of this paper from January when the class started. So naturally, I forgot all about it until 3 days before it was due when I got to class and realized that we had to turn in our topics that day. To be honest, I cannot remember what my topic was for the life of me. I'm sure it was something really dumb. In fact, I can't even remember if it had to be related to literature at all. Who knows. Anyway, I started researching this paper roughly 36 hours before it was due (we needed 5 in-print sources), started writing it about 18 hours before it was due, burnt through the night, only to finish it 20 minutes before class, and to arrive at class 12 minutes late to turn it in.

I got a 96 on this paper.

What's funny is that I literally continue this pattern for every assignment I have in college. I haven't legitimately done homework more than an hour in advance in probably 2 years, and for some reason, I'm still hauling around a better GPA than I had in high school. Not that I'm really bragging, because I'm almost upset with the fact that everyone made college out to be the end all and be all of my future, and I kind of just can't bring myself to care about a system that prides itself on repetition, memorization, and following the antequated thought processes that it does.

College has pretty much become an acting class for me. I spent all of last semester in a world lit class, participating more than anyone else, and not having read a fraction of what we were supposed to read. It's so easy to half-ass your way through classes that have very little to do with any sort of applicable skill, and classes that are built so systematically that they don't even require thinking. I'm convinced that once you figure out the basic idea of a lit class, there is no need to even read. All of the works follow the same predictable theme, and even the "unconventional" is still linear. Just because a book is old, shouldn't automatically mean that it is good.

I realize this sounds like the pretentious bitching of someone who shouldn't be an English major in the first place, but isn't the point of English to break the rules? No one who was ever a truly great writer merely followed formula. It's the exceptional writers that make original work. The one's who break rules, and defy conventions, and throw all of the pre-determined ideas of what is important that do great things. Learning about deconstruction in my theories of lit class is probably the most ironic situation that I'll ever find myself in. Because for all of the worrying about the opressed minority, we certainly don't do shit to actually read what they had to say.

xoxo

Joe