Sunday, March 1, 2009


Last night my roommates and I had a drunken powwow at 3am while my one roommate made various foods to put sriracha on (a poached egg, wontons, a butter cookie... idk, it got weird). The conversation basically ended with a gigantic, collective "FML" because we are all so sick of school. My one roommate interns at Comedy Central and the other works at a fashion PR firm. We are all doing cool things outside of school and we're just so sick of the NYU bullshit. Even classes whose topics should be interesting to me are actually mind-blowingly boring. I can't sit still in a classroom. I feel restless the way I did in high school, perpetually posing the question "Why?" in the face of everything I'm learning. It's what stunted me from doing anything but going through the motions in high school: I couldn't understand why it was important to learn what I was learning. I feel that way now, and I haven't really felt that way since I got to college (except perhaps when I had to take a statistics class). It's really frustrating that we're PAYING $50,000/year to drunkenly groan "FUCK MY LIFE!" when we realize how much work we have and how uninterested we are in doing it.

There's just a total lack of motivation there, because I don't feel like I'm working towards a legitimate goal anymore. Sure, graduation, but that has never been a worry for me. I guess I'm just so convinced that I will be unemployed when I graduate, and I'm so terrified at the prospect of having to move back to my parents' house and work at Best Buy or something that I have completely shut down and stopped thinking of the looming Future. I keep working so hard though, even though I don't want to, even though it's exhausting and pointless. But the kicker is that I work harder for my extracurriculars (NYU Local, this blog, my job at a Book Review) than I do for any of my classes. Because those are the things I want to do, the things that interest me and are in the vein of things I want to do when I graduate. Writing an 8 page paper on dandyism or reading dense case studies by Freud are not things I'd want to do even if I did get paid for them.

Wah wah wah, I guess this is basically just my way of saying "Fuck Sundays."



Jess and Josh said...

Agreed completely.

Another problem I think: you and I (and many of our friends) are so interested in the web/new media, but academia is slow and hasn't really caught on to the power of the Internet yet. There's a big divide between what we're learning and what we're actually doing/what's going on in the world. In another few years I think schooling will be a lot more relevant again--at least I hope.


Jess and Josh said...

that is SUCH A GOOD POINT. god we really can blame everything on the internet (i always do).

David Hodges said...

i think you missed the boat on what a liberal education is for. it's not about dandyism or freud -- it's about developing a skillset necessary to criticize the fuck out of those things and make connections to other things:

this is why i hate irony and relativisim. it means never having to take anything seriously or question their implications :-\

also, you DO blame too many things on the internet. together you and josh have the market on internet and pot ;)