College and the American Dream

11:31 PM on a Sunday night.  The worst time of the week imaginable.  The weekend is gone, and I've hardly done any work.  I've done nothing for the paper I have due tomorrow morning in my 9:15 class.  I woke up at 3:00 PM and I have that lethargy one gets from a short day with no sunlight.  I have no desire to do work.  Or anything near it.  I'm not quite sure what I want, but I don't want to do whatever I'm going to be doing for the next nine or so hours.

Or for the next three weeks, for that matter.  Except for one weekend where I'll be going to New York with a regular crowd of my friends (there will be something like 23 of us staying at my friend's house in Brooklyn), the end of this month and the start of next are going to suck.  I'll have final papers.  I'll have deadlines.  I'll have to worry about the Times New Roman, letting down expectations, whatever expectations there are besides Sandra's (our advisor) and my own.

But when that all comes, it won't be so bad as it now, when I feel so groggy on a Sunday night.  I'm always looking for some magical cure, too.  Like there's some way out there that would make me WANT to write my paper.  A bottle of sprite, cookies, a certain kind of music.  I've already ruled out T.A.T.U. as a possible music for making me want to write my paper.  No, it's only good for thinking about Russian teenage lesbians.

And as I sit here, spending an hour at a time just talking to people online and listening to music, punctuated by looking at the blank page of my essay and writing a paragraph here, I wonder what I'm doing here anyway?  Why am I going to school in Boston?  Why am I going to college at all?  Is there anything I'm getting out of this other than a piece of paper declaring me better than similar people my age, yet will come to have no meaning once I get into a field and have to prove myself?  Am I learning anything that will help me prove myself any more than I would've learned in the extra four years I could've been getting experience?

And I'm an English major, after all.  What am I going to do with that?  I don't really want to be a teacher.  As far as the publishing field and the world of publications, there is the aspect of school providing me an opportunity to create something - the Times New Roman - but often, the "real" schoolwork I have proves to be a hindrance to that.  So what is the point of all the real schoolwork I'm doing?  Why is it necessary for me to crank out meaningless essays about the Hopi pre-occupation with sorcery?

I've been reading this stuff by a guy who thinks that you shouldn't feel required to go to college, that you should look for experience in the real world (or at least just go to community college, where teachers are supposed to be quite good) and save yourself a lot of money.  He's kind of a hippie, sure, but I don't see any reason right now not to agree with him.  There are only two things that keep me here: 1) getting a degree, and recognition for a job I don't want to have, and 2) my friends.  The learning seems like little more than a stepping stone, and a small irrelevant one at that, which I'm being forced to stand on for far too long, waiting for a bunch of assholes to quit hanging out on the next one, and I'm just about to slip and fall into the waters of insanity.

Huff, huff, pant, pant.  It takes time to funnel emotions into a rant.  To drag myself out of a slump of despair.  I mean... it says 11:31 PM Sunday night up there, doesn't it?  It's 6:44 PM on Monday evening as I write this sentence.  I still haven't started the paper that was due this morning.  I got so monolithically depressed last night, for whatever reason, that I just went to sleep.  I gave up entirely on the idea of writing any of the paper at all.  I'll just have to hope I can hand it in a little late.  And if not, this essay, this grade, and this class can go fuck themselves.  A lovely orgy of inanimate/abstract objects.

Yes, that still means that I might be up most of tonight writing a paper that might not even be accepted.  But it won't have the predictable result of leaving me even more depressed.  I'm never in such a mood two nights in a row.  I can always hope things will work out in the end against all expectations.  They seem to have in the past.  Like when I got an A in History of the Vietnam War after not turning in half the take home final.  That was the biggest break-down of my college career thus far, and it worked out fine.  But it sure was stressful, I don't remember much of the class itself (just the room and the teacher), and I don't see it doing anything for my future except as 2.5% of my future degree or whatever it comes out to be.