September began on Thursday, and I went back to school.
I hadn’t slept yet, and I was probably still kinda drunk. Just to make sure, I went over to the Park Inn once their lounge was open. That killed some time.
Oddly, I can’t remember what class Mary and I had on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I remember the room; I remember some of the unrelated things I wrote and sketched out on what were supposed to have been my notes. I still have the notes somewhere. I could go find them and try to divine what class they were actually for. But that sounds like research. Study. And that works against slackerhood. So: it was some class. Live with it.
In fact, it really seems like I had two classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. But, unable to guess what the one I’m certain of might have been, there’s really no point trying to work out the other one now. It’s not that I wasn’t paying any attention, though that was also the case; it’s just that, by the fall semester in 1988, I’d been taking classes three semesters per year since the summer of 1983, when I pointlessly learned all about Fortran and Pascal. And, as mentioned, I switched majors a lot.
I had a sort of…I’m not sure it was really a reason; it may have been an excuse. See…it’s not that I get bored easily; in a real sense, I’ve never been bored in my life. Anytime I get close to boredom, I switch majors. As it were. If something I’m involved in becomes unthrilling, I ignore it and come up with something interesting to do instead. Some people call that ADD; I just call it life.
This was my system in school. Obviously, it’s no longer required, with wikipedia.org now existing. I’d grab a class if it sounded interesting, get the books for the class, read them that night, and be done with it. In a perfect world, a given professor would do more than babysit collegestudents while getting them to read the book; in my world, that rarely happened. So, sophistic though my methods may seem, I just pulled ahead of the teachers and got things over with.
In cases, the books for the classes were interesting enough to convince me to keep the class and see what the teacher might know, apart from the required materials. In most of those cases, I was still disappointed. In a few, I actually learned stuff you won’t find in books. You won’t even find them in this book . Because this is all stuff you can’t just put into words and consider yourself finished; you’ve got to see it happen, try it yourself, and fully understand it.
Arguably, that methodology goes beyond education and into apprenticeship. Whatever the term, it’s worth doing, provided that it’s in a field you can care about.
Incidentally: writing is one of those things. Though, really, I’m not sure how anyone’s supposed to help you with that. There’s reading involved in writing: you read through the stuff others have done, noting what’s good and bad, molesting what’s good into a format you hope no one’s really seen before [though getting that format to make sense to everyone at a glance is also a good idea], and, at some point, after typing out millions of words in novels and chatrooms and blogues, it becomes sorta automatic. I guess.
That divulged: am I good at writing? I can be. Do I prove it very often? Not really. To be ‘good’ at writing takes nothing more than the standard [and boring] rules of composition. You know all the jokes: a preposition is not something to end a sentence with; eschew sesquipedalian elocution in deference to vernacular homogeneity. Because: duh.
Asimov once wrote a story in which a supercomputer was built for the purpose of writing correctly. One of the things it did was rewrote some of Shakespeare’s less defensible metaphors. That’s writing well; it’s just not writing good.
Writing seems to be one of those things I never read the book for and moved on. I happen to like it. Even if no one can really teach me the first thing about it.
Incidentally, I never liked Shakespeare. I never really disliked him; I just don’t wanna know. I get it: he was the bard. Whatever the hell a bard is. It’s just not something I give a damn about. To me, Shakespeare just seems like that pseudointellectual bullshit Roger Ebert likes so much. Not because it makes sense; just because claiming to understand a word of it makes you sound smarter than you are.
And yes: I understand Elizabethan bullshit. That’s precisely why I don’t give a damn about it.
If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not whimper for generations to come?
Not interesting.
And no: I’m not antisemitic. I’m just categorically insulted by anyone—jewish, injun, black, female, or Martian—laying shit on me like I had anything to do with it in the first place. The jews should have Israel; the injuns should have casinos; the blacks should have Africa; the chicks should have aerobics and spandex, because fatchicks in cheap joggingsuit pyjamas are icky.
That was one of the reasons why the eighties were far cooler than anyone today is willing to remember.