naked
I know that most people who read this are going to think that I am just reacting to my recent failure to get an endorsement from the University for my Rhodes application, but I really think that this is something more substantial than just that. Yes, I was annoyed and disappointed, and yes, it might have acted as a catalyst to some certain anxieties that I have had about the quickly approaching and nearly-ubiquitous fact of my future, but I think that perhaps if I am going to quell from this experience anything of worth, I should be honest about these feelings and the root anxieties and uncertainties that they might have brought bubbling to the surface.
First of all, grad school. Do I really want to go to grad school? Yes, I am interested in literature, but enough to be an English Literature Professor? I don't think so. I mean, honestly. I don't read. I read for class, and I read occasionally for pleasure, but even then, it is mostly Entertainment Weekly. I have started a great number of books that I have never finished. Many times they are books that I should , indeed, read, but I get into them and feel bored and not consistently entertained and I quickly put it down. Yes, Lily Bart is a tragic character, Ms. Wharton, but I don't really give a fuck. I have never read, for instance, the final section of To the Lighthouse, yet I wrote a paper on it that was "brilliant." "You should really expand this into a full-length article." Okay, in another year or two, when I've read the last 25 pages. I do a lot of skimming, too, and I am excellent at faking a "provocative" close-read, but I seldom, if ever, read closely. When I do, I'm pretty damn good at it, but why do it unless you have to? Frankly, I think I am too lazy and too good at bullshitting to succeed in grad school. Eventually, I'll have to come clean or I'll be found out,
I do so much bullshitting and get away with it all so well that it never really seemed worth it not to do it. This is the realization I came to about a year ago when I got through 255-- the hardest survey ever for so many nerdy young bookworms-- without reading anything really. I got an A+. Why try? And I'm not gloating-- I'm kind of ashamed of myself. I'm incredibly lazy academically because I can be. There had never been any insentive at all to be more than that. I get straight A's after all.
I try to challenge myself, but I'm always challenging myself with things I know I'll excell at. An Honors Thesis on porn. Wow. How provocative. Not really. Sometimes I wonder if I just study it to have something subtly erotic to talk to boys about-- to engage them in a conversation about sex in a roundabout way. To arouse them and entrap them. To at least get them to say something slightly dirty back to me. Maybe it is all salacious. Maybe it is all for my own sexual pleasure. Maybe the fears of that eighty-year0old man with a Nobel Prize shoved up his ass are 100% correct. Thomas Waugh, himself, when questioned on why he studied pornography said, "Because it turns me on." But at least he is honest about it.
So there it is. I, the lonely gay boy, with a propensity for pornography that is in reality a propensity for sexual attention-- the kind I could not get from the little boys at school who called me bad names. Yes, here I am, deceitful boy with a beerbelly that he could get rid of if he would, for one second, get off his ass and do something about it.
That boy, is me, I, the one who talks only in third person. It's easier that way. I can't sleep at night because I'm a liar. I can't sleep at night because I'm okay with it. I can't sleep at night because occasionally I want to pray. Pray! I kid you not. I wanted to Pray! I wanted a higher power to exist tonight, but instead I logged onto LiveJournal. When faced with the contemplation of the existence of God, I say, proudly, "To the Internet..."
Experience in On-Line Self-Publication.
I say all this because what happened today unveiled for me in some way the fallacy of the humanities that I always was painfully aware existed. Can I answer honestly why I believe the humanities are important? I believe they are important as a testament to human endeavor, to humanity's ability to create, and ultimately, they are aesthetic ideals of work. So, yes they should be studied...
but do i want to study them?
Not really. I don't see that as being something I could really love. Is it? I mean I was for a while incredibly excited about the prospect of a career in academia. I had profs I loved and I really cared about what I was doing, but this semester has been really dull. The idea of reading some of this boring and remedial shit just disgusts me. I don't know if I want to do it.
Then there are the alternative realities... realities I continually have to remind myself are not necessarilly impossible ones. The crazy ones. I want to make a documentary about carnies. Sine I was 17. 17! The idea of documentary film is so exciting to me. I'd love to work with it, And I want to go to Law School... I do. Since I was 17, 17!
I'm just at a point right now where i need to figure out what's going on. And I don't know at all.