Speaking of grad school, this blog post resonates with me a lot, and I’m glad I found it when I did, because it cleared up some aspects of my experience that I’d been confused by

Grad school is about becoming an academic.  It’s about joining the academic culture.  Learning and discovery and knowledge and discussion are all involved, but in the same way that physical fitness is involved in Marine Corps boot camp.  That is to say, intensely, but if you go to boot camp just looking for a workout routine, you’re gonna have a bad time.

Oh, the other thing about the five-paragraph essays, which I forgot to include in the last post, was that the teacher didn’t say anything about them being training wheels, a teaching tool, anything like that – she just said “you are going to learn how to write an essay” and said that “essays” had to have five paragraphs, etc.  Or I think her term might have been “formal essays”?  Anyway, she just acted like this was a common form of communication, an important adult life skill to have, that sort of thing

13-year-old me, of course, haughtily reflected that he had never seen anything written in this form, despite being someone who has Read A Lot Of Things and indeed has a keen sense of what good writing is (I didn’t), and that this wasn’t it (it wasn’t)

I can’t remember if I ever voiced that particular sentiment, but I probably did given how much of a little shit I was at the time – I do specifically remember turning in a (non-5-paragraph-compliant) essay titled “Why Grammar Should Not Be Taught In Schools,” because I was mad about how we were learning grammar, and I can already write grammatically without needing to know what a “prepositional phrase” was, thank you very much.  She returned it to me with a bad grade, several paragraphs of counter-argument re: grammar, and a final note on the actual construction of the essay: “No introduction, incorrect body, no conclusion”

Was commenting on a post by @thepenforests​ about people who liked/disliked school, and that provided me with cause to remember some of the bizarre stuff I “learned” in certain classes

The feature I was trying to describe in my comment was the fact that in my middle and high school classes, difficulty and (especially) high standards had no correlation with how useful/advanced/correct the material was

For instance there was a class in 6th and 7th grade which I would later jokingly refer to as “AP Kindergarten,” because it was an ostensibly advanced class with a hardass teacher, but involved a lot of strangely childish work involving quasi-creative use of construction paper and paste, which was then judged by very rigorous standards of historical relevance etc.

This particular class was about my least favorite ever, because the teacher was a jerk and I had her class for two years, two of six periods a day (4x the usual time) – this was part of a thing the school was doing where they the same person English and history to the same kids back-to-back.

And the English side of this class was even weirder than the history side, because we learned stuff like five-paragraph essays – and I mean not just essays that are five paragraphs, I mean essays in which each of the five paragraphs are exactly five sentences long, and each of the sentences has to fulfill a specific job.  The first and last paragraphs were the “introduction” and “conclusion,” which were supposed to “tell them what you’re going to tell them” and “tell them what you told them,” and each of the middle three paragraphs also had an introduction (first sentence) and conclusion (last), with the same jobs.  So a huge amount of the thing ends up being redundant

It’s not hard to write like this, per se, but as you’d expect it’s hard to write like this without producing terrible writing, and so I’d keep looking at what I wrote and knowing I couldn’t break the rules, but wondering if I’d also be marked down for just writing something bad (and as a pretentious 13-year-old convinced I was a Brilliant Writer, well, you can imagine how this rankled)

The one other teacher for the “advanced” joint English-history thing was this beloved jokester who was a total pushover and did quirky things like throwing stale marshmallows at students when they misbehaved.  There was this time when both classes learned some Greek plays and got together to perform them to each other, and the kids in the nice teacher’s class kept flubbing their lines and stuff, and for what it’s worth – i.e. very little if anything – the kids in my class, with the hardass teacher, did way better in our rendition of Sophocles.  Probably thanks to, e.g., how after rehearsals of scenes – this also happened with every class presentation – there would be a sort of Q&A session where everyone else in the class was encouraged to offer praise or criticism (“I could really believe she was his father” was said of a 13-year-old girl playing my character’s father; “I thought [s]he could have been more engaging” was a common, maddeningly generic criticism)

Another example of this sort of thing was my marine science teacher in high school, this spacey surfer-dude guy who seemed to actually be very knowledgable, and made us do stuff like memorize a detailed taxonomy of marine animals (I still remember that there are things called “ctenophores” and that “chordates” have “notochords,” whatever those are) – but delivered all this information in rambling disorganized lectures full of anecdotes about diving trips and other irrelevances, which we would have to pay careful attention to because anything he had ever said in lecture was fair game on tests.  This was a hard class and I was stressed out about my grade the whole time, which meant I did my exhausted listless teenage best to take in every word, including things like a random philosophical digression on how “when you think about it, the earth can’t actually spin,” because “everything has a smallest part with no smaller internal parts, and there must be one at the center of the earth, but how could it spin if it has no constituent parts to go in circles”

Feeling bleak/anxious this evening and unable to enjoy any activity, which lately has never been happening except on my days off

I wonder if one of the things that keeps people in 9-5 “daily grind” type schedules – people who could plausibly have other options, I mean – is that it feels bad when you stop daily-grinding, at least in the very short term

Sorry about that last one, I dunno what’s gotten into me

I’m spending less time on the internet these days and maybe I have missed ranting about trivial internet crap

napoleonchingon:

nostalgebraist:

baroquespiral:

wirehead-wannabe:

adzolotl:

argumate:

argumate:

fierceawakening:

the fact that bring me to life is a mocking meme really rustles my jimmies because i actually unironically like that song

so every time i see that meme, i feel like the entire internet is telling me i have poor taste worthy only of scorn

I WILL DEFEND OVERLY DRAMATIC SONGS TO THE DEATH IF I MUST

but yeah there are multiple ways of appreciating things

one can recognise the absurdity while still sincerely enjoying it

see also: sex

i only have sex ironically

Fucking hipsters

see also: life

imo New Sincerity should reverse into ideology-critique, though, not the other way around

Level 1 is recognizing the absurdity of sex while still sincerely enjoying it.  Level 2 is asking, wait, what makes it absurd again? what does that mean? and realizing the perception of “absurdity” is just an interpretation of its distance from a) an false ideal image of sex that serves patriarchy and consumerism b) norms of seriousness and dignity grounded in centuries of sexually repressed culture.  “recognizing the absurdity of sex while still sincerely enjoying it” would be an absurd statement to societies that sacralized it in a depth of physical detail our most “sex-positive” media are still afraid to broach without demure veils of irony

Level 1 is defending overly dramatic songs in spite of their absurdity; Level 2 is realizing “overly dramatic”, as applied to Evanescence and not over half of P4k indieprog for the past decade, just means “too enjoyable for the Protestant ethos”

I really like this, although I think I’m usually on some other (horizontally adjacent rather than higher/lower?) “level” where I think that “absurdity” and “lack of dignity/seriousness” are an important part of life itself and for that very reason there are good and bad ways to do them in art – ways that enhance the sense of synching up with the whole of life as it is lived vs. ways that detract from that sense

“Serious” as in “deeply moving art” conflicts with “serious” as in “dignified and mature” because deeply moving experiences IRL are rarely “dignified and mature” through and through – but then, if we’re using “deeply moving experiences IRL” as our benchmark, that still is a benchmark and one can fail to meet it in various ways, so it isn’t just “anything goes”

But even if there’s a wrong way to be undignified, being undignified in the wrong way isn’t a dealbreaker just in itself, the thing can still be enjoyable overall – which for me is the territory called “one can recognize the absurdity while still sincerely enjoying it”

(I really like Bring Me To Life btw)

Overly dramatic music and sex (at least sex in non-religious people tumblr-culture) is actually a pretty good analogy because any negatives with both of those are entirely about shame rather than guilt. Like it’s not expected that you’d listen to “Bring me to life” and feel bad about listening to it. In fact the mental image of someone who does that is itself comical. Instead, the societal expectation is that you should be ashamed of going on about how much you like “Bring me to Life” publically.

So I think analogizing this with the protestant work ethic or with old-school sexual taboos as @baroquespiral did is an “off-by-one-metalevel” error. The message of mocking Bring Me To Life is not in the content (”dramatic music is bad”), but in letting you know “there are publically acceptable opinions about things, and even if they’re wrong, you should be wary of contradicting them in full view”.

(full disclosure: I hate pretty much anything I’ve ever heard by Evanescence)

Ahhh yeah good stuff here

Sorry to get confessional out of nowhere but I think it’s an example that draws the distinction very clearly: I spent a lot of evenings in late 2010 crying while listening to this song, because I wanted that kind of deep emotional connection and specifically familial, “adult” kind of connection and felt (“knew”) I’d never have it bc I was too much of an eccentric outsider to ever be in a traditional familial role like that, etc. etc.

And the thing is, it’s not actually an “overly dramatic” song (it’s dramatic, but so’s the subject matter, inherently), or a bad song at all.  It’s just not “good” music in the sense of musical or lyrical innovation.  It’s completely transparent and it’s the kind of song you would expect about the thing it’s obviously about.  Hence why I might conceivably feel embarrassed (though I don’t) mentioning how much I like it – it’s not that people think liking this kind of music is bad (although some may), but that professing to like it is just sort of … boring? not bringing much to the table?  I don’t really know how to put it.

(Like, compare it to this, where there’s a certain nerd-hipster appeal to detailing why the music resonates with me – that’s “””interesting,””” in a way that talking about “Wonderland” isn’t; it’s the kind of content that might get you reading my blog in the first place, as opposed to the kind of content you care about because you already know me)

(via sungodsevenoclock)

Bad Mood Day over here, dunno what to do with myself

baroquespiral:

wirehead-wannabe:

adzolotl:

argumate:

argumate:

fierceawakening:

the fact that bring me to life is a mocking meme really rustles my jimmies because i actually unironically like that song

so every time i see that meme, i feel like the entire internet is telling me i have poor taste worthy only of scorn

I WILL DEFEND OVERLY DRAMATIC SONGS TO THE DEATH IF I MUST

but yeah there are multiple ways of appreciating things

one can recognise the absurdity while still sincerely enjoying it

see also: sex

i only have sex ironically

Fucking hipsters

see also: life

imo New Sincerity should reverse into ideology-critique, though, not the other way around

Level 1 is recognizing the absurdity of sex while still sincerely enjoying it.  Level 2 is asking, wait, what makes it absurd again? what does that mean? and realizing the perception of “absurdity” is just an interpretation of its distance from a) an false ideal image of sex that serves patriarchy and consumerism b) norms of seriousness and dignity grounded in centuries of sexually repressed culture.  “recognizing the absurdity of sex while still sincerely enjoying it” would be an absurd statement to societies that sacralized it in a depth of physical detail our most “sex-positive” media are still afraid to broach without demure veils of irony

Level 1 is defending overly dramatic songs in spite of their absurdity; Level 2 is realizing “overly dramatic”, as applied to Evanescence and not over half of P4k indieprog for the past decade, just means “too enjoyable for the Protestant ethos”

I really like this, although I think I’m usually on some other (horizontally adjacent rather than higher/lower?) “level” where I think that “absurdity” and “lack of dignity/seriousness” are an important part of life itself and for that very reason there are good and bad ways to do them in art – ways that enhance the sense of synching up with the whole of life as it is lived vs. ways that detract from that sense

“Serious” as in “deeply moving art” conflicts with “serious” as in “dignified and mature” because deeply moving experiences IRL are rarely “dignified and mature” through and through – but then, if we’re using “deeply moving experiences IRL” as our benchmark, that still is a benchmark and one can fail to meet it in various ways, so it isn’t just “anything goes”

But even if there’s a wrong way to be undignified, being undignified in the wrong way isn’t a dealbreaker just in itself, the thing can still be enjoyable overall – which for me is the territory called “one can recognize the absurdity while still sincerely enjoying it”

(I really like Bring Me To Life btw)

(via wirehead-wannabe)

My dad said he’d heard good things about the Black Mirror 2014 Christmas special and wanted to watch it, so yesterday evening we did, and, like, it was good, it was well-done, but I just kept thinking “this is exactly like a nightmare I would have”

Then later in the evening I thought “you know I loved the first season of Utopia (the British show) but I never did watch the second season, even though it got good reviews,” and I started watching it, and it’s also (as of 2 episodes) good and well-done and very bleak and depressing, qualitatively moreso than the first season

I find “paranoid PKD-ian human drama about people with horrible deeds weighing on their consciences” a very appealing genre but watching too much of it probably isn’t good for me, I imagine

i’m in an extremely sappy mood rn and have managed to feel sad on behalf of (a) russian revolutionary vera zasulich and (b) the guy in the Mantis post

which is just the subject matter of my last two posts if you don’t count the frog one which i haven’t found a way to feel sad about yet