There used to be some concern, at least in my mind, that the things I write here are boring and repetitious, and void of any real content. That may even have been true while I was working retail during the past year. In light of the past hour and a half, though, I now feel much better about the things I used to write. I just spent a good size chunk of time reading a twelve page .pdf of a scanned chapter about narrative. The author had maybe three interesting points that could have been summed up in four pages. I wouldn't be all that upset, as twelve pages isn't normally very long, but I know that this probably won't be important in class Monday. The last reading assignment was a 30 page small print history of narrative, and I decided that I was going to read the hell out of it. I highlighted, wrote in the margins, and even made notes to myself about what I was going to ask in class and even made conjecture about what we might discuss as a whole. I'm a serious student now, right? No longer the aloof academic screw-up with a singular focus on animation that I was in undergrad, right? I read that damn thing for three and a half hours, fighting fatigue and my almost non-existent attention span, trying to make sense of the schizophrenic academic language that these damn things are always written in. My brother knows what I'm talking about; we've had this discussion about academic writing being needlessly complex and murky.

The discussion in class was focused around a powerpoint presentation of images pilfered from the internet. A dozen or so slides with jpegs on a black background as a (dubious) supplement to a lecture about symbols in history. We covered maybe half of what I had read for class. It was marginally interesting, but nobody else in the room really knew how to add to a possible discussion. I said something and one of my classmates, a card-carrying Superextrovert if ever there was one, said something, and that was it. These are smart people, too. Maybe things will get better, I don't know.

As I've been writing this, the squeaky-voiced guy I mentioned before sat down about thirty feet from me. I have my earphones in, and his little muppet voice still cuts through the live recording of the Smashing Pumpkins song "I am One"; roughly eight minutes of distorted guitar crunch and screaming vocals. This is no match for his super-sonic warblings, though. For some reason, I keep seeing him around this big campus, a place where it's possible to never see a good deal of the student population. Of course I see him, but for the life of me I can't seem to run into the cute Bulgarian artist with whom I discussed Christo and pop art for the better part of two hours the other night at the Hoarat. Insert irritated sigh here.