College Sucks

Or Wednesday, whatever. As for the title, I couldn't really think of anything else, so, college sucks. Mainly because I have so much work to do this week, as it is midterm week. That things had to be pushed back a bit.

Let's see here, I had to write a poem for advanced poetry today - that took a whole thirty minutes so it doesn't count, a reading review, which took thirty to forty minutes, I had two 5-6 pages essays that were due Friday at midnight (Both got moved, one to Saturday at midnight, and the other to next Friday, the 18th by midnight), I had to write a journal entry on Girls, which is basically just me discussing the episodes we watched and discussing the readings for that week. And to top it all off, I had a shit ton of Modern Logic work to do. I love this class, it's challenging, and I love a good challenge, but by God is the workload ridiculous. The assignment was one through five, six through ten for over achievers. I know what you're thinking, ten questions, that ain't so bad. WRONG. Each question has multiple parts, each part is a letter, question one goes to "r," two to "m," three to "n," four to "f" (and each part is two problems), and five goes to "i." The over-achievers have six to "h," seven to "m," eight to "g," nine to "n" and ten to "h." Essentially that's 60 questions for non-over-achievers and an extra 50 for the over-achievers.

Why is this, in any way, acceptable. Do professors not realize that we have other classes, that require us to read, and write as well. I didn't even include the reading assignments I had, or the movie assignments for my film classes (I had to watch The Searchers for Tuesday and I have to watch High Noon for Thursday). I get that professors don't keep in touch with each other and all discuss what assignments their handing out. But for Pete's sake (again, who is this Pete I keep talking about), were they not students themselves. Do they not remember this? Or do they, and this is just their sick way of getting some sort of satisfaction out of it? As if it were some diabolical plot. "I had to do fifty problems write four essays and read 120 pages all in the span of three days and it sucked, so now you do as well."

After class on Monday, the assignment was at first, not even possible. I mean it, I spent more than an hour doing everything short of banging my head against a wall to try and figure out just one problem in the first set of 18 (1, a-r). On top of all of that, the cherry on top of the icing. The thing that pisses me off about this the most. I have no time to play Grand Theft Auto 5, Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5 ReMix, or Beyond: Two Souls, AND I am four shows behind. I have Sleepy Hollow, The Blacklist, Supernatural, and Sons of Anarchy. After tonight, who knows how far behind I'll be, it makes me sad, very sad.

I don't know how my suite mate can manage being behind. He still has like shows from last week to watch.

Thankfully, there's a break coming up, Friday from 3:20 until Wednesday at 11:15. That entire break will be spent catching up on shows, and destroying GTA and B:TS. Hopefully, my professors don't come up with any surprise assignments for us to do over break that completely ruins the point of a break. In high school, it was terrible, in college, it's even worse. Because in college, the assignments are longer, and the breaks, shorter. When you finally finish, you do this, and when you wake up, the break is over and you had literally no free time to yourself.

It's straight up torture. I've had tough semester's before. Tougher work load semesters. Hell for some reason I decided that my second semester as a Freshman would be fun if I had six. SIX. Literature classes. That's just reading, and writing essays. Reading a lot, and writing a lot of essays. That's all it is. Nothing more, no fun assignments, no sixty logic problems. Just pick up a book, read it, and write an essay on it. Every week. But I will admit that my favorite class I've ever taken was in that semester, so I don't regret it at all. Confronting Death was the class, and it was phenomenal. God, that Michael Cera .gif is mesmerizing.

So, about that poem assignment, it came out of left field, right after he had just given another assignment, which admittedly is going to be one of the best assignments ever. The first assignment is longstanding, for the rest of the semester - and son of a bitch my suite mate just turned on his X-Box, time to listen to Call of Duty for the next twelve hours. I don't understand the appeal of Call of Duty, well, the appeal of taking Call of Duty seriously and playing for anything other than fun. He was literally yelling at the TV yesterday, well, yelling at someone over his mic, about how they were "dicking around" and having fun. I know right, I guess no one is allowed to play video games for fun any more. I think that's what I hate about it the most. It changes people, it turns non scumbags into scumbags, and scumbags into meaningless sacks of shit.

The best part was that someone called him a "bitch ass nigga," nigga is used in a vain attempt to be politically correct, rest assured there was an "er" in the place of that "a." Then he accused that person of not knowing how to speak English. As the English major in the room, I had to inform him that "bitch ass nigga," is proper grammar, and that the person was giving him the label "bitch ass nigga." I don't normally get joy out of doing this, but it felt so good here, because he is so annoying when he gets into these stupid insult arguments where it's just one insult thrown back and forth one right after the other, that I just want to punch the mother fucker. Anyways, I have to write "bitch ass nigga" one more time.

So back to that first assignment. My professor bought a typewriter, off craigslist, for what I believe he said was ten bucks. and he is giving it to us, to take ho our homes, and use in order to write a poem that is confined to the space of adding machine tape. All of this is in the spirit of the book we just read, A. R. Ammons Tape for the Turn of the Year in which he does the same thing. We all contribute to the piece, one at a time, and we keep going until the semester is over. I'm not sure what will come of it after the fact, i.e. once the class is over, but it will be a fun little experiment. He is even allowing us to get together and work on some of it in a group, passing it around as we write.

The second assignment was just to submit any poem we had for workshop and bring in four copies. So I reworked an old poem that means quite a lot to me that I have used in every poetry class I've had, all three of them now. But the form is entirely different, a lot of the words that were in the old poem are still there, but reworked and moved around to create an entirely different poem. I actually prefer this newer version to the older version. the poem was written as a letter, to my older brother who died shortly after birth, and it didn't have the shape of a letter, now it does. It just looks better, though I'm not quite convinced it sounds better, it's still a slow reading poem, with a lot of pauses and breaks. I just haven't read it aloud to myself enough to know whether or not it sounds better compared to the old version.

Anywho, I have class soon, thirty minutes to be exact so I gotta bounce (who says bounce anymore? God I'm lame). So here's a video, and I'll see you Friday.