A Small Bit Which Echoes the Big Bit

In the immortal words of Alice Cooper, "The time in which students pursue academic wisdom has temporarily ceased for the three or four hottest months of the Gregorian calendar!" Er, it's something like that. Regardless, school's out for summer!

I approached the whole checking of my grades thing with some trepidation. I have been, surprisingly, somewhat less than cavalier about my studies this year. I signed on to the USU website, typed in my password--my password is thisisnotmypasswordatallbuttryitanywayfucker--and played a bit of Spider Solitaire while I waited for my excruciatingly slow internet to rape and pillage its way through the USU server and bring my grades, brutalized and bleeding, to my monitor. And hey, I was pleasantly surprised. I slogged my way through some seriously useless shit to get those grades. My mind would probably explode if I didn't complain just a bit about some of my experiences this school year.

First of all, one of my teachers was a complete idiot. I don't mean that in the good way, as in the village idiot who makes every villager laugh while only requiring the rape of but one virgin per year. I mean the kind of idiot who don't know jack shit. This professor was one of three with whom I had the privilege of interacting for the entire year, not just a single semester. I'll admit that the second semester was my own fault; I chose to be in her class again because my first class with her was extremely laid back. Let me explain (even if you withhold your permission, I'll explain anyway).

Ms. Lesbosprite--I decided to omit her real name; Lesbosprite will do because she had lesbian-short hair and was midget-height like a fairy--was in charge of my Professional Writing Technology course. For those of you unfamiliar with Writing, look elsewhere; I don't provide examples of that shit anywhere. The Professional aspect fits in the name because I am being trained to do dumb stuff like write instruction manuals and make pretty newsletters. The Technology bit--computers, networking, the wheel--is the one I'm going to explain. We were to learn various software programs which will undoubtedly give us an edge in the competitive workplace. I mean, what average college graduate knows an obscure program like Microsoft Word? See? That's why I'm going to be a kickass writer-person; I know Microsoft Word. Ms. Lesbosprite, however, did not. Now, I'm willing to cut her some slack. Word had recently been overhauled and the university had just acquired the newest version. All the students were complaining about how very hard it was to use--probably the same kids who bitch and moan every time Facebook changes a little. I was just getting in the groove of it; I'd had to write a paper or two, so I knew the basics. Blah, blah, blah this train of thought now officially bores me. Long story short: I had to help my technology professor adjust her margins.

Confession: I started this post a few days ago. I wasn't near a computer for a while, so I just got back to this. I bet you can tell where my thoughts tried to regroup but got Waterlooed. I'll push my brain a little bit harder--I know there was a lot of pointless shit to wade through during this past year--but I'll try to keep things a bit more succinct.

I've always considered studying literature to be something of a drag. Seriously, I don't see how Shakespeare, Faulkner and (include another person I rarely read but list anyway to sound intelligent) meant to include all the meanings we read into them. All these meanings, themes and motifs are lost on me. Oh, I can write about them; I can go on for pages about this shit, but why should I? What exactly am I learning from these dead auteurs? Ah yes, timeless messages of humanity. . . fuck those. The only thing timeless about these messages is really clever pun and/or joke! (Wow, I'm really not into this today)

That last paragraph where I said I'd stick to the point be damned! I'll bitch and moan for as many words as I want. I took a film class last semester which basically involved literary analysis but from a film perspective. We looked at issues of gender, sexuality, money, violence etc. in Hollywood films. And good for us. I had to write page after page about movies whose plots I could barely remember, but I managed to ace the class by using words like mise en scene, syuzhet and fabula. In fact, I ended up writing 8 pages--not a lot, I realize--on Memento. It wasn't the 8 pages that bothered me, though, and I still love the movie. The thing that bothered me was that I analyzed this movie frame-by-frame, looking for things that the director may or may not have intended, and then I wrote a paper about how people are greedy, women are sluts and human memory is subject to distortion. Yup, I got an 'A' for writing something I could have seen walking around campus: some sorority chick wearing a mini-skirt, complaining about her crappy new Lexus and forgetting who she blew the night before.

Ah, what an enlightening time! It's hard to describe the many ways I was enriched over the past year. I could go on about all the strange assignments--X-Files brochure, anyone?--I had to do, assignments that made me noticeably smarter. . . I find myself utterly conclusion-less at this time. Uhhhh, my life has been forever changed in a (adjective) way.