What a wonderful summer indeed! I'm quite content. No, I didn'’t intend to be content this summer and I certainly didn'’t expect to be, but the peculiar admixture of sufficient sleep and stress-free intellectual stimulation has done wonders. This brings up an important epistemological question: Why am I learning more on both the human and academic level during summertime than during the school year?
One answer has to do with the emphasis of the public school system. Any education institution that assumes near perfection from nearly everyone is an institution designed for stuffy mediocrity and base unoriginality, plain and simple. Each and every day I'm told in school, "This is very easy. You ought to get everything correct."” So, like the obedient student I am, I try to get everything correct. All of my peers too try to get everything correct and we collectively choreograph a cut-throat dog-fight, where I distinguishing myself based on the point in grade spectrum from 90 to a 100 that I land. I can'’t help but think that it'’s fastidiousness and precision that'’s emphasized in system like this, and that higher pleasures such as creativity, abstractness, passion, and logical advancement are merely second thoughts. Intellect is collateral damage in the college process that demands hyper-perfection.
If the summer is when the real learning takes place, then what have I learned? Here are but a few things, and I make no apologies for my delightful obscurity. (The number/bullet point is the paragraph's lazy drunkard cousin.)
- The environment is worth hiking for. See: the front page of the Ledger, Tree Hugging Chronicles
- If you feel insecure or overly exposed, just strangle the bothersome emotions with words. Basically, over-articulate unadulterated feelings and those feelings become torpid under the linguistic weight. Then you can then just brush them aside. See: Sunny from the Catcher in the Rye.
- When you commute three hours to work each day, you lose a little bit of your money and a little bit of your soul. See: Psychiatrics at the New York Weill Cornell Center. Am I worker or a patient?
- Drugs are a decidedly unattractive option. See: Requiem.
- Bad things happen when you revel in your anonymity. See: the "Prick Debate." 1
- You mustn't start a clause with "Due to." -- it means "caused by" not "because of." Also, "different than" should be "different from."” See: Cliffs Guide to English Grammar.
- Don't ever enter a car if you don't know where you're going. See: Cameron's Culture, the teeming underbelly of John Jay social life, the nihilism that that thrives in the darkness between dusk and dawn and feasts on quick thrills and empty promises.
- Arrogance can actually be palpable. See: www.TheLiberalConviction.com.
1. Update: though my remark about loving nom de plumes but hating the French was brilliant, I've decided -- after a request and a little book learnin' about AOL proxy servers -- to respect the American legal system and suspend my conclusions, as I believe that reasonable doubt still exists. I was soundly reminded that slandering someone anonymously is just as morally reprehensible as defaming someone illegitimately. ↑
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