Why my peers may never speak to me again
The course i'm on at University involves taking four modules a year, each with 1-2 hours of lectures a week and an hour's seminar every one or two weeks, topped off by 1-3 3,000 word essays and a 1-2 hour exam (possibly more if you take half a module - one term long, but still with an essay and exam).
One of the modules this year has been Religion and Global Modernities. This has been one of the dullest, most desk-gnawing subjects yet, and whereas I sat through two-hour lectures on the inanities of tribes who spell their names with a capital *tongue-click*, and lectures on mysticism which would be hard enough if the lecturer weren't (A) speaking English as their second language, (B) incompetent. But this takes the cake. Imagine sitting through two hours of a man stammering, stuttering and slurring (we suspect he turns up to lectures drunk) as he reads off a set of quotes from various books which are not only going to be posted online later but are ON THE FUCKING POWERPOINT BEHIND HIM. For someone who can't read too well this might be understandable (being the magnificent intellectuals you are, you wouldn't know anything about that, would you?) but since it takes me all of three seconds to read the slide, and maybe ten more to plot out its potential significance etc in my mind, to sit through a man taking TWENTY seconds to read it, and another three minutes to explain it? Well, it's just as well I started taking a thermos of tea to the lectures, otherwise i'd snap.
I regularly cut out of his lectures after the first hour, during the break, but this week I managed to stay throughout, because it was a topic I find particularly interesting:
SATANISTS, VAMPIRES AND PEOPLE WHO THINK THEY ARE DRAGONS Yeah, that got your attention.
Yes, it's what you think it is - two hours of proper academic discussion on the church of satan, temple of set etc, a full rundown of the vampire system of ethics, pondering the origins of the term "psychic vampires" and, well, Furries, but the previous parts made up for that.
But herein lies a problem.
I try not to be ZOMGMEMEME! if I know something, but the fact is I do know this sort of thing, and the lecturers know it too. And something so thoroughly batshit insane as this? You'd better believe i'm all over that. So when it came time to answer a question, or if the lecturer forgot a detail, I gamely joined in - "It was probably '97 not 2007 [when Anton LaVey died]", "[Varg Vikernes] moved onto racist heathen paganry since then", "[the churchburnings were in] norway, not scandinavia", "[psychic vampires] feed on people's emotional energy".
The seminar was even worse for me revealing to my exceedingly vanilla peers (course peers, not life peers - i'm simply without peer :D) the extent of my knowledge. I was right of course - romanticised vampires were a literary invention far removed from the reanimated corpses of folklore, for example - but nice girls who want to become primary school teachers will insist on asking me "wait, what's a furry?"
To their credit, they responded with "Dude, really? Lol", and not "BURN HIM!", and seriously considered whether consuming human blood has any medical benefit, even if I had to use episodes of CSI they had seen to get them thinking. But it's not the best of reps to have, since apparently uni is the time one does the networking in order to survive in the outside world. and should I fail at life and have to get a job at a *bleurgh*, primary school, I am most certainly not going to be referred by someone who remembers me explaining to them how a blood ritual works.
TL;DR? I've realized that the one thing I am a bona-fide expert in will be of no help at all in the real world.
One of the modules this year has been Religion and Global Modernities. This has been one of the dullest, most desk-gnawing subjects yet, and whereas I sat through two-hour lectures on the inanities of tribes who spell their names with a capital *tongue-click*, and lectures on mysticism which would be hard enough if the lecturer weren't (A) speaking English as their second language, (B) incompetent. But this takes the cake. Imagine sitting through two hours of a man stammering, stuttering and slurring (we suspect he turns up to lectures drunk) as he reads off a set of quotes from various books which are not only going to be posted online later but are ON THE FUCKING POWERPOINT BEHIND HIM. For someone who can't read too well this might be understandable (being the magnificent intellectuals you are, you wouldn't know anything about that, would you?) but since it takes me all of three seconds to read the slide, and maybe ten more to plot out its potential significance etc in my mind, to sit through a man taking TWENTY seconds to read it, and another three minutes to explain it? Well, it's just as well I started taking a thermos of tea to the lectures, otherwise i'd snap.
I regularly cut out of his lectures after the first hour, during the break, but this week I managed to stay throughout, because it was a topic I find particularly interesting:
SATANISTS, VAMPIRES AND PEOPLE WHO THINK THEY ARE DRAGONS Yeah, that got your attention.
Yes, it's what you think it is - two hours of proper academic discussion on the church of satan, temple of set etc, a full rundown of the vampire system of ethics, pondering the origins of the term "psychic vampires" and, well, Furries, but the previous parts made up for that.
But herein lies a problem.
I try not to be ZOMGMEMEME! if I know something, but the fact is I do know this sort of thing, and the lecturers know it too. And something so thoroughly batshit insane as this? You'd better believe i'm all over that. So when it came time to answer a question, or if the lecturer forgot a detail, I gamely joined in - "It was probably '97 not 2007 [when Anton LaVey died]", "[Varg Vikernes] moved onto racist heathen paganry since then", "[the churchburnings were in] norway, not scandinavia", "[psychic vampires] feed on people's emotional energy".
The seminar was even worse for me revealing to my exceedingly vanilla peers (course peers, not life peers - i'm simply without peer :D) the extent of my knowledge. I was right of course - romanticised vampires were a literary invention far removed from the reanimated corpses of folklore, for example - but nice girls who want to become primary school teachers will insist on asking me "wait, what's a furry?"
To their credit, they responded with "Dude, really? Lol", and not "BURN HIM!", and seriously considered whether consuming human blood has any medical benefit, even if I had to use episodes of CSI they had seen to get them thinking. But it's not the best of reps to have, since apparently uni is the time one does the networking in order to survive in the outside world. and should I fail at life and have to get a job at a *bleurgh*, primary school, I am most certainly not going to be referred by someone who remembers me explaining to them how a blood ritual works.
TL;DR? I've realized that the one thing I am a bona-fide expert in will be of no help at all in the real world.