striving for excellence?

I think my favorite part of the quarter has got to be the syllabus day.  What other day can you sit in a classroom listening to someone talk to you about how to get a good grade in his class.  I love it when this person suddenly floats into the clouds, pontificating on the merits of "striving for excellence" in his class, of "succeeding" in his class, of "giving it every ounce of effort."

Is this a joke?

Please.  Striving for excellence?  Didn't these words mean something once?  Didn't they apply to serving the community, or finishing a project that you love?  Or learning something new?  Now, "striving for excellence" has been reduced to earning points on quizes and papers.  I can hardly contain myself.  The classroom is not the whole world.  And I'm not even bitter about any of it.  Today, sitting in my ridiculous class, I realized that I outgrew the purpose of undergraduate education long ago, and I feel good about that.  I think almost everyone I know has outgrown it, and we're glad to be done wasting our time.

On a lighter note, my schedule changed about five times this morning.  Now I think it's set.

we end

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

T.S. Eliot
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for your soul

I think that everyone needs a little Rilke now and then.  I know I do.  So I post here, with apologies, a really fantastic poem.

Childhood

It would be good to give much thought, before

you try to find words for something so lost,

for those long childhood afternoons you knew

that vanished so completely - and why?

We're still reminded: sometimes by a rain,

but we can no longer say what it means;

life was never again so filled with meeting,

with reunion and with passing on

as back then, when nothing happened to us

except what happens to things and creatures:

we lived their world as something human,

and became filled to the brim with figures.

And became as lonely as a shepherd

and as overburdened by vast distances,

and summoned and stirred as from far away,

and slowly, like a long new thread,

introduced into that picture-sequence

where now having to go on bewilders us.

48 Hours

It's finals week, obviously.  And I wish I could say that it's an easy finals week and that I'm calm about it, but I think that my usual sense of security has actually freaked me out a bit.  So now I'm worrying that I haven't studied enough or learned enough this quarter to do well.  I'm worried I haven't paid enough attention in general.  I suppose I just mostly feel kind of lost.

I think that reading more Astronomy things on my own time haven't helped this feeling of listlessness.  All of the cosmology is just starting to freak out my brain and I can't take it all in.  Most people know how much I love science and learning about astrophysics, but it's honestly just starting to mess with my mind.  And I know this sounds stupid, like just put down the book already, but it happened before I saw it coming.  So now I'm just floating around trying to remember insane crap about Central Asia.

I was having a really amazing conversation with someone today who asked me what finals I have tomorrow.  We ended up talking about American history and culture for about an hour, and I honestly feel like I've learned a lot and I'm just ready to graduate.  I was shocked at the things coming out of my mouth, because usually I'm so afraid of sounding ridiculous when I talk about my supposed "specialty."  It unnerves me when people ask me really unbelieveably specific questions about History and I never seem to know the answer, which makes me feel just so unintelligent.  But I've seemed to reach that point where undergrad means basically nothing to me.  There are good profs here and there, and good lectures here and there, but mostly, it's just completely useless.  Papers papers papers.  Blah blah blah.  Let's write five pages about something people spend their lives writing about.  Please . . . right?  Let's just get on with our lives.

I complain about the same basic things over and over, I know.  It's just on my mind a lot and the fact that my brain is freaking out about the universe and time right now, it's not helping.  I'm serious about the universe stuff.  I've been reading more about time lately, and my whole perspective of what time actually is has shifted.

I just wrote three paragraphs of a story that I would like to post in the brothers but I'm not sure it's good.  I like the writing, but I think the story is probably silly.  I'm wondering when the creator might unleash his visionary power and post something himself, because I have been looking forward to it for quite some time.

i have so much to do...

As the subject implies, this will be the most hellish day of the quarter, as I must finish up two essays for tomorrow. One is a research paper, which sucks.

On Thursday after class I'm just going to stumble out of class and curl up on the nearest bench for a nap, because I probably won't be able to make it back to my apartment immediately.

In other news, if you haven't read anything by Augusten Burroughs, I highly recommend that you do. It's very similar to David Sedaris, in that the books are so good you can't leave them at home, but you inevitably laugh a lot in public when you are reading. Having something light to read (both in the cheerful sense and the academic sense) is usually a good idea for me when in the midst of writing for class, so I don't go insane.

Ok, here I go.
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