What the hell am I doing here?

So I'm back to questioning the future. I can't seem to figure out what it is I'm going to be doing for the rest of my life. Recently I thought I had at least the next few years planned out. But now that I'm back at school I'm not sure. All this schooling is costing me and my folks a lot of money. I thought Grad School was something I wanted to do, but the academic world is giving me a bad taste in my mouth. Besides, I'm tired of being poor. Writing is about all I can do with any skill, but that's not really a career...is it? Everyone tells me it can be. Except when they ask me about my major. "What are you going to do with a BA in English?" I have no idea. I don't want to teach and that's about all you can do with it. I like the idea of school, but I've only met two teachers at this school who have any real passion for teaching (and only one of them was a good "teacher"). So what the hell does that mean?

My girlfriend (and most people) seem to think that the point of college is to prove you can "put up with bullshit." That piece of paper that says "Look, I can jump through your hoops." Is that what college is? One of the reasons I wanted to go to college in the begining was "for my own edification." I simply wanted to learn. But I look back on the past few years, and what have I learned? I've learned how to be fake. I've learned disposable facts, figures, and concepts (some of which have some higher level value, but all are forgotten...because there is hardly any real-world application for any of this stuff). No one here can seem to help me become a better writer. It's the same old rubber stamped "A" or "B" with very little imput and/or guidance. Composition teachers tell their students to limit the page counts because they "don't want to read all that." The few marks they make on your papers are intelligible chicken scratches. No one knows your name, or your face...you're just a number.

The decline of civilization will come about, I think in part from the fact that no one really knows anything. We have these library's full of books...books we qualify as "knowledge." But is that knowledge really 'known' is no one reads them? Seek and scan, browse your way to an easy "A". That's the mantra out here in the dark, grimy, psudo-intellectual world of college. When you get out of college, what is it that you can do? If you major in something practical, like accounting or nursing you can do those things. Become an accountant or a nurse. But what if you major in History or English? These are branches of abstract, impractical knowledge...they aren't skills. I can't feed my family with the Civil War. I can't build a house with five paragraph theme essays.

Is this what I should be doing? Wasting the best years of my life, when I'm the most imaginative and idealistic...on learning how to think, talk, and act like everyone who's lived and died for the past 2,000 years?

Book Swap

One of my KCPD friends told me about this website where you can swap books with other readers (she told me it's saved her tons of $$$ on books). I haven't had the time to check it out yet, but here is the addy:


www.paperbackswap.com

Back to School

Well I'm back in the dorm. Glad my blog is back up and running (not sure what the problem was). Summer sure was a bitch, all that work (and heat). I hope this new school year will be as rockin' as the last one. So besides working, what did I do this summer? Well I read my @$$ off!

Here is the list of books I read this summer:

1. The Autobiography of Johnny Cash
2. Oliver Twist
3. The Giver
4. The Iliad
5. Crime and Punishment
6. One Flew Over the Cockoo's Nest
7. Sex, Drugs, and Coco-Puffs
8. The Outsiders
9. The Best Short Stories of Fydor Dostoevsky
10. The Catcher in the Rye
11. From A Buick 8
12. The Switch
13. Survivor
14. The Odyssey
15. Of Mice and Men

Currently I'm 2/3 the way through Mario Puzo's THE FAMILY. Not sure if I'm going to be able to finish it, since Monday is the first day of class...and I'm taking 2 lit. classes (one of my texts books is THE GRAPES OF WRATH). Gulp.