I hate my English Comp class. Half of the kids are borderline insane, the second half are snobs (even snobbier than me), and the best part is that many are snobby and insane. The prof has some issues too. She chews gum throughout the class, she says 'yeaaaah, hmmmm, oook' every few seconds, and she refuses to shut people up. She also says certain things in some sort of accent that I can't figure out. But the real problem with English 205 is the material.

Our text is Signs of Life which is a fucking awful compilation of essays about pop culture and 'semiotics' (the study of signs, or so I'm told). If you ever see a class with this in the reading list run in the other direction. It's a series of mostly bad essays, most of which lack a central theme, what I call a thesis. Basically, Signs of Life is 40 essays from little known others spouting their totally random theories on consumerism and marketing and other 'who gives a fuck' topics. The draw conclusions from red herring and non-sequiter logic, and the rare glimpses of solid logic lead to conclusions that were barely worth reading. Everyone knows that packaging gets people to buy products, did I really need to read 10 pages that simply repeated the above fact 500 times? Did I need to read the next 10 pages about how humans package themselves??? Um, no. Do I need to read some man's diatribe on shopping, that is followed by a woman's diatribe on shopping? No, again.

I'm not trying to say this class is beneath me, because it totally is not. If anything I'm shocked by how much smarter everyone is than me, and I'm equally shocked with how poor my writing has been. Did I mention that for each reading, there's 2 for each class, we have to write 2 pages. That's 4 pages every class meeting, 8 pages a week. And each one of my little essays has sucked thus far. It's no big deal because they're not really graded, but it still bothers me that my writing quality is so bad. I mean if I am ever to make a living in any of the many things I've considered than I need to become an excellent writer. My excellence in writing can't be only here and there when I choose to really care, it has to be consistently excellent or else I should just go I-bank. I have to be clear and insightful with any topic I discuss even if I think the topic is useless. This class is really a challenge, and it's really pointing out my shortcomings as a potential public-intellectual/pro writer/pro historian/academic/firm lawyer/journalist/otherthings.

Afterthought: I really can't soak up these essays' arguments. I can understand their overall points, but how they're arriving at them is a mystery to me. Most of it seems pretty simple to me but then when I try to write it down I can't seem to articulate their points. Worse yet, I can't articulate my analysis of their commentary, which is scaring the shit out of me. I'm going to have to really throw myself into this so I can figure out what the hell is wrong.

Final afterthought: I blew off writing the reflection on today's 3 essays to write this post. I hope you enjoyed my misery, and I hope you enjoy your's too.

Happy Valentines Day
Happy Singles Awareness Day (stolen from someone who I'm guessing stole it from someone else who stole it from someone else...)