Why I ain't been around lately
I'm stealing a few minutes here to tell the nice people who emailed me wondering where the hell I was and saying they hoped I wouldn't quit writing this blog that I'm not sure when I'll be able to any more. Probably not much, not the way it looks now. Ever since this semester started I been buried in schoolwork. It wasn't nothing like this last year, not nearly so much anyway, and it seems like suddenly I got no time for nothing but reading books and writing reports and then reading more books. I've been spending half my time in the library down to Augusta, and the other half in front of this computer writing about what I read. I ain't seen Sam to speak of in a month. Christ, I had no idea school was like this. I never did this much work in high school; I didn't do this much work in this college last year. My head feels like it's going to explode any second, and to tell you the truth, I'm starting to think I ain't cut out for this college shit after all. In the last month I had to read two whole big books on the Federalist Papers, Dante's Inferno (the goddamndest poem I ever read, if that's what it is), a bunch of essays by some guy named White about how to write, and a humongous book about the history of Asia, and that don't count all the chapters I been working on in calculus and algebra and biology and what all, and now they want me to sign up to take a goddam language.
I was planning on getting away up to the woods again for a couple weeks during hunting season, but if I got any hope of doing that, I got a shitload of work I got to do first. I swear, if I knew it was going to be like this I don't think I ever would have started, Aunt Flo or no Aunt Flo. Who they think I am, some goddam genius or something? Maybe I ought to cut back on some of these classes or something because I ain't this smart and I sure as hell ain't this quick. Maybe I signed up for too much, it was just that going by last year, I wasn't expecting to have to work so hard every goddam minute would get used up like this. Right now I should be finishing up a essay on Jefferson's letter to the Danbury Baptists and getting set to write one on "The underlying political satire in The Inferno." What satire, for chrissake? Does that mean he was making fun of real people in his poem/book/whatever? How am I supposed to know that? How can I answer a question I don't even understand, let alone write a whole essay on it?
You know, this school told me when I signed up that I could "work at my own pace." Well, this ain't my own pace. My pace is about ten times slower than this. I ain't what they call a "quick study", not by a long shot. I been thinking lately while all this was going on that maybe I ain't as dumb as I used to think I was, maybe it's just it takes me longer than most folks to get things through my thick head. Because some of my teachers (besides Ms. Thompson that you already know about) said some nice things about some of the stuff I've wrote the last few weeks, not so much about grammar and shit as about what I actually said. I wrote this essay for American history about the Declaration of Independence, about how I figured after I read all this stuff about it that what it really about was Jefferson's religious views as much as his political views and instead of writing about the Declaration I ended up writing about Deism because that's what I thought was important.
You ain't going to believe this but I got a goddam A on that paper even though the grammar sucked because the professor said I was "thinking deeply and outside the box", whatever that means, and that I had a "intuitive understanding of the forces that shaped Jefferson's thinking", which I guess means I figured right. But that was one time I was just writing what it seemed like to me. A lot of the time I'm just reading what other people think and then spitting it back out like a piece of apple that got stuck in my throat, and half the time I don't really know what the hell I'm talking about. But that don't seem to matter to anybody as long as I spit the right stuff back. I got a B minus on a paper for biology where I just put in a lot of quotes from the books I read and loaded up the goddam thing with about a hundred footnotes (this professor likes footnotes) and all I really wrote was a few sentences to get from one quote to the next in that whole 10-page paper. I was doing it because I just didn't have enough goddam time and it took me so long to write this book report on The Iliad--another long book/poem about the Greek wars that I actually liked a lot once I got used to the way it was written--that I figured just this once I would slide by because if I didn't there was no way it was going to get done on time. I thought he would nail me on that one for sure but he didn't, I don't know why. He liked it fine. Maybe I'll do more like that one. Hell, that was a breeze compared to actually thinking about all that shit for myself and trying to make sense of it. Maybe I been going about this school business all wrong.
Anyway, I got to get back to them Baptists. I just wanted to let you all know I ain't exactly forgot about this, I just ain't exactly had no time to do it, if you know what I mean, and I don't know when I will. I kind of miss doing it, but now school's back for real Ms. Thompson's had me up to my neck in "classics", which are OK when I can work out what they mean but holy hell when I can't. I still got to try to figure out what "political satire" they're talking about. When I read it (well, most of it. OK, some of it) I thought it was some weird fantasy story about religion. I didn't see no politics in it at all, but maybe I don't know enough about what Italy was like then and I ought to read a book about it, like I don't have enough to do.
See what I mean? It just never seems to stop. It's like setting out to fix some little thing in your house like replacing some busted tiles in the bathroom and then when you get them tore out you find out the whole wall is rotten underneath and what you really got to do is tear the whole thing out and re-do the stud-framing so it's straight and then when you do that you find out the sill ain't level no more. Tje job always grows, you know? And once you start you never really get done, it's just one thing leads to the next and that thing leads to two more and they lead to-- Well, you get the drift.
Anyway, I'll try to do more here when I can and I ain't so tired I'm seeing double. I hope you understand.
Posted at 10:39 pm by emmett
