In Which She Realized that Young People are Boring and Labor is Better When Mistaken for Later...
I thought that this journal desperately needed a lighter entry. Not that other entries are intensively serious, but they’re still very unlike those that used to feature on this blog page when I initially started it… Try and go read some of the first few entries and you’ll see what I’m referring to. Then, this got me thinking about the purpose of this blog, how much it has changed since its creation, and the direction in which I want to take it. But really, let’s not go there today…
So here I was at the library with my dear friend Antoine… and we were of course, attempting to study… attempting, and also miserably failing to. In between scenes of “Le Coeur a ses Raisons” and a cheesy 90s adaptation of the Justice League… well, we… no, I mean WE, WE, admirable, studious and bright Masters students were *scolded* by an ignorant, obnoxious, pesky little first year telling us to keep it quiet! One semester at the University’s library and those little brats think they own the place… plus, who did she think she was fooling? Are we really supposed to believe that she was actually studying for real??!!
First years are not meant to study, and if they do, they are fools. First years are meant to indulge and participate in night activities involving booze, loud music and other persons… What was she doing up at this time of the day anyway? Had she been a true first year, she would have been stuck in bed, recovering from said activities… that’s what is expected of a decent first year. You can’t go around ruining the inheritance passed down to you by other first years for generations and generations. Indeed, you need to respect your elders and not do indecent things like trying to study, for instance.
She can’t have been a real first year… I refuse to believe that first years have become so boring and rude as to tell us, sorry, I mean US, fifth years what to do and not do in the library. So maybe she wasn’t a first year, maybe she was just a lousy undercover agent trying to pass for a first year, and doing a really crappy job at it… I’d rather believe that she was, instead of facing the idea that all those nights of systematic, hard and dirty partying have been flushed down the drain, along with many of our hard earned vomit during said partying! This cannot be happening…. Ever!
And honestly we weren’t really making *that* much noise! We’d decided to watch a few scenes from various TV shows (without the sound obviously) because we’d been working so hard it felt like our brains were leaking out of our ears… and really, there are far more fun and entertaining ways to obtain this result than by studying (confer first year parties, but being fifth years, we’re not allowed this kind of leisure time any longer and so we try to get by as best as we can).
Life as a fifth year student is hard. No really it is. I mean, at some point during our studious sojourn at the library, Antoine showed me a few notes he’d just written down, saying that I might find them interesting… and this is how I came to read about the “sexual division of later”… quite astonishing, isn’t it?
You think you know about all the bizarre and twisted topics people like to work on… And, well, you don’t. “La Division Sexuelle du Plus Tard”, doesn’t that have a nice ring to it? Studying SF, I wasn’t as surprised as I was intrigued. You usually think that time is genderless, and here comes a guy (or a girl) that says otherwise; that’s certainly worth looking into.
However, I was wondering what Antoine was doing studying this since he’s working on Marxism and Capitalism in the Gay Community. So I read it aloud (well, not that loud since we were in a library, and people these days are so touchy!) and Antoine looked at me in a funny way, then looked down at his notes and said: “Yes, the sexual division of later, which is an innovating study regarding 17th century SF novels…”
Skepticism must have showed on my face, with a touch of disappointment as I point out that both SF and novels as we know them today didn’t exist in the 17th century. We did agree though that the sexual division of later somewhat sounded more interesting than the sexual division of labor.
See how being a fifth year student is hard? Our brains are so filled up and stressed out that we can’t even copy down without errors.