(no subject)
This is the kind of digressions I go into when given a keyboard and 45 minutes of nothing to do because I'm stupid. All grammar and spelling errors stay, 'cos I'm lazy.
.
Reflection: I reflect that my organization skills suck, woo hoo, and harddrive wipes suck. I also haven’t read any of these books in a year and the only one I own is Age of Innocence and I hate it with a burning, fiery hate of all things useless and boring.
Also, I’m in a bad mood. So I’m going to continue to sit here and feel sorry for myself and angry because I can and I need to look like I’m doing something. All in all, I figure mine was actually an inserted passage into Things Fall Apart in the POV of his daughter, because I like minor characters, but no one else really does so what does it matter anyway. I could write you pages on Grantaire and novels on Norrington or Gillette, I could spend years on Lt. Bush, and ages on characters like Fitz Kreiner, and all in all no one will care because, while they range from bit parts to supporting characters, they’re not main ones and thus no one feels like forming attachments to them unless they’re just as pathetically geeky as I am. So what’s the point? I will write from the POV of an unloved character, which will make everyone predisposed to dislike it, which will earn me a bad grade, and I will achieve nothing besides having wasted more of my words on a project when I could save them for a prompt. That’s why I hate school. They never want you to be clever, they just want you to be smart. It’s not about can you do what other people would never think of doing, it’s about can you fill these premade requirements of how we thing everyone should act, and I’m sorry, but I’m just not comfortable with that. I refuse to fill them, which lowers my grades when combined with my natural laziness, which in turn, ironically enough, makes it harder for me to get into an art school where no one should think like anyone else. Thank you, structured educational system, I knew you would fail me, so I’m not surprised. All this means is that at the end of the day, the last thing I want to do is go home and shove my brain back into that neat little box public education has built for it, so forget homework, it’s a waste of time. I stopped learning useful or interesting things in most of my classes years ago. I mean, I like history and literature and even logic and puzzles, but as far as calculus and grammar and dates and names I’ve got no interest for them. Did you know, there’s this amazing movie called Iron Jawed Angels, about the real group of suffragettes you never learn about in school? They don’t teach you this stuff. Why? It’s real, it’s got a story, a more engaging story than the fat old ladies who took all the credit for what the other women achieved. Or the wars. Take the French Revolutionary Wars- the middle ones, with Napoleon’s rise to power. Sure, blood running through the streets of Paris, it’s all very interesting, but you only hear half the conflict. It’s not just France at war with itself, It’s a war between the three main European powers. France, determined to overthrow Louis, who was allied with the English, allies itself with Spain. There’s sea battles, land battles, coups and insurrections, Napoleon comes to power and then loses it, and we gloss over all of this, or they just teach us dates. These events were more than dates, they were months spent in stinking ships, battles that were massive and cannonfire, black powder in the air, screaming and gore and all the things boys like to hear about.
But then, I can’t say the fault’s entirely with the school system, soulless as it may be. There’s something wrong with the kids, too. They aren’t moved by anything. You can’t let a sonnet or a song or a scene move you, you can’t be stricken with sorrow or horror when you see someone die onscreen, you have to laugh. There’s no love for books in a general sense, there’s either dislike or the urge to analyze pounded in our heads. When was the last time you sat down and read one of these classics just to lose yourself in them? The theatre has a meager few enthusiasts, not even the people onstage all care; it’s too sissy to allow yourself to give in to emotion and feel a story. The world has no fantasy left. You can see it in the movies and the books and everything being mass-produced; everything is hackneyed, clichéd, and poorly written. Where are our JRR Tolkeins, our Victor Hugos, our Charles Dickens and our Socrates, where are our Lovecrafts and our Pratchetts, even? On the way to being done, in a generation far removed and hardly read by my generation. We read Meyer, and Paolini, and bargain-bin trash that grasps us for a moment but in the end was hardly worth it at all. What enrichment hath this wrought? It teaches us to fly on shoddy ill-used words and half-thought endings, it does not raise us up but dumb us down. We are not Poe, we are not Shakespeare, we are not Marlowe or Stevenson or Frost. We do not allow our words to fly free, let them praise us or damn us, but we make them chains and tie them to our feet. I could return to blaming public education, for I’m sure it’s an American epidemic, but have no knowledge of abroad; whether they have atrophy of the mind as well or is it true that Americans breed stupidity into our children? The never-ending decrease in emphasis on history, and learning, certainly does not do us credit. Are we simpletons? Is everything they’ve said true? Because if it is, America, I cannot be proud of you. I want to live in a country where Frodo Lives and there are little green men from Mars. Not one where everything must be cut, dried, and ended. Where Sports Illustrated is more influential than Chaucer. Where we cannot even seem to bring ourselves to think at all, unless it is that worthless thing called ‘Critical Thinking’ that these classes pound into the heads of their ‘intelligent’ students and ruin them for true thought. I want to read a poem to feel it, to read a book to lose myself, I want to hear music and weep for it, I want to see a play and let it take away my heart. I want to learn by being, not by being taught. I see your box, and reject it.
.
Reflection: I reflect that my organization skills suck, woo hoo, and harddrive wipes suck. I also haven’t read any of these books in a year and the only one I own is Age of Innocence and I hate it with a burning, fiery hate of all things useless and boring.
Also, I’m in a bad mood. So I’m going to continue to sit here and feel sorry for myself and angry because I can and I need to look like I’m doing something. All in all, I figure mine was actually an inserted passage into Things Fall Apart in the POV of his daughter, because I like minor characters, but no one else really does so what does it matter anyway. I could write you pages on Grantaire and novels on Norrington or Gillette, I could spend years on Lt. Bush, and ages on characters like Fitz Kreiner, and all in all no one will care because, while they range from bit parts to supporting characters, they’re not main ones and thus no one feels like forming attachments to them unless they’re just as pathetically geeky as I am. So what’s the point? I will write from the POV of an unloved character, which will make everyone predisposed to dislike it, which will earn me a bad grade, and I will achieve nothing besides having wasted more of my words on a project when I could save them for a prompt. That’s why I hate school. They never want you to be clever, they just want you to be smart. It’s not about can you do what other people would never think of doing, it’s about can you fill these premade requirements of how we thing everyone should act, and I’m sorry, but I’m just not comfortable with that. I refuse to fill them, which lowers my grades when combined with my natural laziness, which in turn, ironically enough, makes it harder for me to get into an art school where no one should think like anyone else. Thank you, structured educational system, I knew you would fail me, so I’m not surprised. All this means is that at the end of the day, the last thing I want to do is go home and shove my brain back into that neat little box public education has built for it, so forget homework, it’s a waste of time. I stopped learning useful or interesting things in most of my classes years ago. I mean, I like history and literature and even logic and puzzles, but as far as calculus and grammar and dates and names I’ve got no interest for them. Did you know, there’s this amazing movie called Iron Jawed Angels, about the real group of suffragettes you never learn about in school? They don’t teach you this stuff. Why? It’s real, it’s got a story, a more engaging story than the fat old ladies who took all the credit for what the other women achieved. Or the wars. Take the French Revolutionary Wars- the middle ones, with Napoleon’s rise to power. Sure, blood running through the streets of Paris, it’s all very interesting, but you only hear half the conflict. It’s not just France at war with itself, It’s a war between the three main European powers. France, determined to overthrow Louis, who was allied with the English, allies itself with Spain. There’s sea battles, land battles, coups and insurrections, Napoleon comes to power and then loses it, and we gloss over all of this, or they just teach us dates. These events were more than dates, they were months spent in stinking ships, battles that were massive and cannonfire, black powder in the air, screaming and gore and all the things boys like to hear about.
But then, I can’t say the fault’s entirely with the school system, soulless as it may be. There’s something wrong with the kids, too. They aren’t moved by anything. You can’t let a sonnet or a song or a scene move you, you can’t be stricken with sorrow or horror when you see someone die onscreen, you have to laugh. There’s no love for books in a general sense, there’s either dislike or the urge to analyze pounded in our heads. When was the last time you sat down and read one of these classics just to lose yourself in them? The theatre has a meager few enthusiasts, not even the people onstage all care; it’s too sissy to allow yourself to give in to emotion and feel a story. The world has no fantasy left. You can see it in the movies and the books and everything being mass-produced; everything is hackneyed, clichéd, and poorly written. Where are our JRR Tolkeins, our Victor Hugos, our Charles Dickens and our Socrates, where are our Lovecrafts and our Pratchetts, even? On the way to being done, in a generation far removed and hardly read by my generation. We read Meyer, and Paolini, and bargain-bin trash that grasps us for a moment but in the end was hardly worth it at all. What enrichment hath this wrought? It teaches us to fly on shoddy ill-used words and half-thought endings, it does not raise us up but dumb us down. We are not Poe, we are not Shakespeare, we are not Marlowe or Stevenson or Frost. We do not allow our words to fly free, let them praise us or damn us, but we make them chains and tie them to our feet. I could return to blaming public education, for I’m sure it’s an American epidemic, but have no knowledge of abroad; whether they have atrophy of the mind as well or is it true that Americans breed stupidity into our children? The never-ending decrease in emphasis on history, and learning, certainly does not do us credit. Are we simpletons? Is everything they’ve said true? Because if it is, America, I cannot be proud of you. I want to live in a country where Frodo Lives and there are little green men from Mars. Not one where everything must be cut, dried, and ended. Where Sports Illustrated is more influential than Chaucer. Where we cannot even seem to bring ourselves to think at all, unless it is that worthless thing called ‘Critical Thinking’ that these classes pound into the heads of their ‘intelligent’ students and ruin them for true thought. I want to read a poem to feel it, to read a book to lose myself, I want to hear music and weep for it, I want to see a play and let it take away my heart. I want to learn by being, not by being taught. I see your box, and reject it.