SomeMusings.com

Daniel M

I’m not going to apologize for not updating this blog in over a week. I’m just going to ramble about how busy I am.

I have fallen victim to a vicious cycle. I devote creative energy to more personal and long-term projects, and then I remember that I have a blog. I’ll feel the need to make an especially meaty post to compensate for my absence, but of course I’ll be too busy or tired at that very moment, so I’ll save the writing for another day. Of course, on said other day, I’ll feel even more obligated to churn out something of great quality to justify my absense. It’s a vicious, vicious cycle.

My classes this semester haven’t helped much, either. Last go-round I took about twelve hours per week of math and econ courses. It was all skill-based. I showed up, learned the skill, slept through the extra examples, and performed on the final. No one cared if I participated in the class, or even if I came to class at all.

This semester I’m taking eighteen hours, and I’m knocking out a chunk of my humanities. I’m taking classes where I not only have to show up, but I also have to suit up, sit at the front, and try to impress the teacher all without looking like I’m trying too hard.

This is harder than romancing a woman. A teacher is a woman who is paid to be spoiled for hours every weekday with oodles of free attention. When you’re romancing a woman, rejection merely means that you have to look elsewhere. Rejection from a teacher means permanent failure. There’s no “just being yourself” around the person that can abort your career before it is born. If a woman were to make me do busywork, I could just walk away. My busywork is the only thing that I can offer a teacher.

And oh, the busywork. I’m not saying that I’m doing the most busywork of any person ever, but I am saying that I am doing way too much busywork.

At that imaginary school that I wish I attended, there is a court of my peers with the power to nullify any homework assignment that I can prove to be worthless. I think that this system would be pretty popular. Most people already think that complaining makes problems go away. How much would you pay to turn your eloquent gripes into more free time? Fifteen, twenty dollars? If it were on Tigercash, I think I’d pay about thirty bucks for an appearance in front of the Busywork Department of Justice. It’s time to apply market forces to the homework problem. Best case scenario, every child is handed a degree in Philosophy as soon as they are born.

Let’s test this system on for size. Dramatically describe your most pointless homework assignment. Convince us that it will have no practical application, ever. Earn sympathy by telling us what else you have to do this week. For extra bonus points, use the word thusly.

Go.