Maybe I am just jealous.

Today, all I've need to accomplish is to read a 14 page excerpt on structuralist literary criticism. It is now 6:54 pm and apparently this has proven too much for me to handle. Granted, I'm on page 12, and I didn't wake up until noon, but I'm still averaging less than two pages an hour.


Earlier Moe and I took turns reading paragraphs of our assigned readings aloud, secretly competing to see who was attempting to absorb the more mind-numbingly dense academic work. His book on the historical spread of various clans across the Arabian peninsula centuries ago (or something boring like that, I sure as hell wasn't paying attention) won, but that doesn't mean I'm not going to complain about the convoluted bullshit I've been struggling all day to pretend I care about. As I read about the belief that all cultural practices, literature included, should be analyzed from the perspective of comparing an individual work to all others in its field to discover meaning, I can't read more than a few lines without pausing to reflect on the sheer pretentiousness of this work, comparing it, of course, among the framework of scholarly essays as a whole to prove I'm learning something. (Even typing that sentence made me feel like a jackass)


Currently I've reached a spot where the author has picked out five people who've made "memorable" advancements in structuralism since it was first created, scholars whose entire lives' works are each summarized in a page hidden in a chapter hidden in a book about a theory that's sure only to be read by:

a) unenthusiastic college students, only because it's a requirement for their major,

b) an only marginally more enthusiastic college professor, simply browsing for something to assign to said college students, or

c) the random douchebag doing legitimate, independent research he hopes to be seen as so revolutionary as to be included in the next revision of the book.


Basically, though I've been kicking it around for the last two and a half years, I have definitively realized that there's only one evident objective for being an English major at the college I'm paying more than $8,000 a semester to attend: to have done so much research on something meticulous within an already obscure topic that I'm mentioned later in someone else's slightly more in depth research paper.

If it sounds that uninteresting posted on a blog, imagine how dull it must be to live that life. Sigh.