HUGE Tracts of Land!

I have come to the important conclusion that I have been persistently making a fundamental error in how I have gone about conducting my life. I do not think that this is particularly anyone's fault, or caused by any one thing or event that has happened to me. I can point to two specific issues, however, which I know for sure contributed the problem. The first is that I made the naive mistake of showing far too much literacy too early in my life. That, of course, sounds really backhandedly arrogant. Oh, woe is me. I could read when I was but a wee lass. My life has been ruined.

Whatever. I make no bones about the fact that I am quite literate and always have been. Other people get to be extremely attractive or talented or athletic, and I get to be literate.

Anyway, the actual problem is that all of the adults in my life noticed this, and as a result, told me two things:

• That I could be whatever I wanted when I grew up, and

• That the thing I would be would be Great.

No pressure. By Great, I mean rocket scientist (this was not unheard of, given the proximity of NASA. I knew actual rocket scientists). President. Murphy by-God Brown. Of course, who is going to tell a kid that they are going to grow up to be tech support? That would be a great way to induce alcoholism in six-year-olds. So, upon being told that I was really smart and would therefore be Great, I spent the next twenty-two years trying to be just that.

Great.

There is just one problem: I, it turns out, am not Great. I do not suck or anything. I received a marriage proposal from a man in Tanzania at four this morning because I fixed his website. So, I would definitely argue that I am above average, but Great may not be in the cards, and I think I understand the origin of this rather drastic misunderstanding, and it comes down to algebra (and if we are speaking literally, Algebra II. Thanks Ms. Stark. You ruined me for maths at a very important juncture and as a result I am not a physicist. And yes, I blame you, personally, for this.); consider a graph where x is age and y is academic prowess. I feel like I started out with a greater y-intercept than my peers but have a less steep slope. Everyone else started out with a lesser y-intercept but have a steeper slope. As a result, we have all ended up at roughly the same (x,y) by now.

Except for those bitches who made my life miserable in eighth grade. May all of their soufflés fall flat into eternity.*

Verily.

I had a point.

Oh, it is that I am probably merely above average, and I find that I am happier having come to that conclusion. Strange as it is, I actually rather enjoy my eight hours at a desk. Perhaps I enjoy it because it is new, or because I know I shall not be doing this job in six months' time, or because I am aware that I am no longer sinking into the swamp of student debt. I built the castle of college, and it sank into the swamp. So then I built the castle of grad school, and that sank into the swamp. But now I am building a castle of employment---and this one is going to stay up.

There may yet be a capacity for greatness within me, but I have have to say that I prefer happiness to greatness, and I shall not ever again sacrifice the former for the latter. I know for sure that it is the unconditional love I have received from such luminaries as my parents, my friends, and my wife which has made me comfortable with this decision. My attempts at greatness required far too many sacrifices and far too many bottles of wine, and the thing is, by the time I actually got into a position where I could get to alleged greatness, I was so damned sick of it that I pretty well just hated it all, and if I were married to someone with a more volatile temperament, I would be incredibly divorced right now.

And that would suck all over the place.

Anyway, I still might do something super awesome with myself. I am still working on my alleged novel (in fact, that is the working title. Alleged Novel: A Memoir of the Future), and I am going to take all the trainings at work so that I can have a slightly less frenetic job (because I am here to tell you that I only have about six months of this in me. Seriously). I am going to continue to improve myself, but in the interim I have every intention of being content.

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*Seriously, fuck them. Assholes.

Academic L'esprit de L'escalier

I maintain my dislike of the methodology of graduate school, and I have realised why: I need time.

I need time to ruminate on things, and I need time to read things carefully -- not all the things -- but the things which need reading, I need to be able to read, not skim, and think carefully about their implications. I need time to make the connections. This might mean that I am not smart and/or quick enough for graduate school.

The problem is, though, that most of the cognitive revelations I have made in my life have come over the course of time. Sometimes I require only days, but usually it is weeks or months. Just last night I came to a conclusion regarding a nuance of my relationship with Amber. Coincidentally, it took just precisely four and one half years as we began dating on the sixteenth of June in 2007.

Four and one half years. I have lived with this woman for four years. Lived with her.

So it ought not have come as a surprise to me when I realised that given time to ruminate on something, I can actually come up with useful things to say about it. This is to say that I have a severe, chronic, and perhaps terminal case of academic l'esprit de l'escalier.

One of the things I told the kids at my erstwhile employment was that if one does not know what to write for one's paper, it is incredibly likely that one has not read enough. That is probably one of the reasons they did not like me, other than my scintillating personality. At any rate, I have recently discovered that for the whole of this semester, I was simply not reading enough -- or, at least, I was not reading the right things.

For some reason or other, I find reading articles less daunting than reading books. It is probably because if I read a forty page article, it has made the whole of its point in that time and I may now consider the implications. However, if I am reading a book and leave off at forty pages to pick it up later, I have to backtrack several pages to remember what the author was on about. I suspect also that it is easier to distill the contents an article into a point without achieving too much distraction. When I read books, I invariably find more questions than I find answers. I hear that is a good thing, but when I have a paper to write and it is not meant to be thesis or dissertation length, it is highly problematic.

It is all of these problems which lead me to have an extension for my Historiography term paper. Fortunately, I am now performing competently, having had time to consider the issue without the obstreperous commentary of Smugly McHipsterpants. As God is my witness, if he is in any other class with me, I will destroy him with my mind. We could power small cities on his ego.

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In other news, I realised earlier, in reading a retrospective on Christopher Hitchens, that my largest bone to pick with him is actually not at all over the existence of God. It is over his support of the war in Iraq.

Which is allegedly over.

I still want to move to Gloucestershire and be a blacksmith.

No Cats Were Harmed in the Writing of this Post

I am not going to say that I hate deadlines because everyone says that, and for me it is not all that true anyway.

I will say that I am not terribly sure about this graduate school idea. I constantly feel...stupid. It is an irritating feeling because I know that I am not stupid about most things, but based on what has happened to me thus far this fall, one would never know it.

Lord, have mercy. If Amber's cat does not cease shouting in the next ten seconds, he shall be tamales.

Right. Graduate school. For one thing, I think that reading a book per week per class is ludicrous. How the hell is anyone meant to learn anything just cramming repeatedly? Furthermore, seminars are also ludicrous. Why in hell am I paying a thousand dollars per class to listen to other people with the same education level as me talk about what they think? I do not CARE what they think, particularly since the majority of it is egotistical prattle. I want to know what the professor thinks, not what that guy over there thinks because science is SOOO much better than history.

AND

I. Do. NOT. Give A Damn about the alleged debate over objectivity. For the sake of all which is holy and the other stuff which is not, I do not understand why it took eight weeks to dispatch it, especially with Smugly McHipsterpants going on about whether or not the furniture is in fact present.

How about I pick up one of the chairs and smack him across the teeth with it? Would that prove that it is there? Or, given that no one can truly be objective, there would be no proof that I smacked him at all. That class has been less than useful.

I am also sick of most things I say being refuted with the phrase "Well, I do not know what YOU have been reading, but..."

DAMMIT, I have been reading the book which was on the bloody reading list, and since I somehow managed to make it for twenty-seven years, through public school and a bachelor's degree, I think I am possessed of fairly reasonable reading comprehension. So when I say that the fecking Franciscans and Dominicans held conflicting notions about what their roles in New Spain -- and that of the lay Spanish -- were, and tell you why that was, I bloody well know what I am on about.

Which brings me to why I am up right now and writing a blog post instead of working on the term paper which is due at half past six on Tuesday evening, or the other term paper which is due at some undisclosed time on Friday. Everything is too damn nebulous. How's that for a nebulous statement?

I want to run off to Gloucestershire and be a blacksmith or something. I can appreciate that I do not know everything about history -- that I, in fact, know very little when it comes to it -- but dammit, when I DO know something, I do not need people telling me that I do not.

And I recognise that the problem is in the nuances, and that is all well and good. I know that I am not very strong in oral presentations and that I communicate much better in writing, so theoretically, my paper should be fine. In the interim, I am probably going to fail out of grad school anyway because my papers do not count for enough.

And because the book review I had to write probably counts for too much. No one should ever ask for my opinion because then I will feel compelled to give it to them, and apparently, that is not even something one should do when writing a book review.

I had a point.

It may have had something to do with the fact that I have lost zero pounds this semester, do not sleep properly, and will probably not get very good grades anyway. That may have not been it after all, but it is still a valid point.

At this point, I feel like I am just in damage control mode. Get the papers written, get everything done, so I can start over next semester in classes with which I have at least a passing familiarity with the material and may hope against hope that no one wants to go on about objectivity.