Too Cool for School

I just finished slogging through an 1130 page novel (Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson) about math in roughly two weeks (NOTE: page count added to indicate my reading speed in a book through which I'm "slogging").  Well, it wasn't really about math.  It was about World War II gold and the modern threat of the disintegration of traditional political and economic borders due to the encroaching inevitability of ubiquitous high-speed internet in southeast Asia the Philippines.  However, there was a staggeringly large amount of information on both number theory and cryptanalysis contained in the text.  Indeed, there was enough about it to cause a caesura in my reading of the novel, during which I read a bunch of free information about elementary number theory (available in your local library if you're a traditionalist, or on the internet if you're lazy).  It's been quite a long time since a novel has made me fundamentally question my worldview, and while I'm not sure if anyone else would accuse Stephenson of being an epiphany-inducing author, I am about to do so.

I've always loved stories, and whether those stories are contained in books, comics, video games, or films (pornographic or otherwise), I've been able to transport myself through time and space to really feel myself become part of the stories (especially the pornographic films).  Naturally, then, I majored in English Literature in college, where I learned that stories are both banal and a tool for white male imperialists desperately seeking to maintain their tenuous-yet-iron grip on the economic forces that keep them in power while holding down the rest of what could be modern society but is instead, thanks to those aforementioned stories, an ignorant mish-mash of uneducated wage slaves whose only function is to feed the maw of the white-male-ruled military-industrial complex. 

Right on, man, white males ruin everything.  Wait...what?

What I've realized, thanks in part to Stephenson's novel, is that the entire preceding sentence is, for lack of a better phrase, complete and utter horseshit (also see my humorously crossed-out phrase in the first paragraph).  Unfortunately, it's also completely and utterly the point of every literature class I've been a part of in the single undergraduate and two graduate institutions I've attended.  Assuming that the dominant discourse somehow pervades and greatly affects the quality of your daily life assumes that you have nothing better to do than sit around thinking about the which discourse(s) affect you and how you can somehow use them to facilitate financial gain.  This is the life of the social theorist, the cultural critic, and the English major, who, for all their theoretical smarts, still haven't figured out how to do anything that would be considered useful outside of academic circles.  If you think you're affected by the oppressiveness of a discourse, congratulations!  Your family was rich enough to send you to a college where they taught you about discourses. 

Thank god our discourse runs the world!

I wrote all that to write all this: I've spent the greater part of the past six years defending my decision to study literature, both to others and to the gnawing sense of regret that eats away at me when I try to make Photoshop work and it laughs at me.  I think now I'm finally man enough to admit I made a mistake when it comes to my chosen academic field, because I fell in with the crowd of story-haters.  After almost a decade of reading for academic gain, I'm  reading for pleasure again, and I've found the divine something that made me love stories in the first place.  This is why I crossed out the sentence in the first paragraph.  Neil Stephenson's book is certainly about the eroding of traditional concepts of border, but it's also just a really fucking cool story about war, smart people, computers, and Cap'n Crunch. 

I've realized that the absolute dumbest thing you can do is study something you love in college, unless that something is one of the sciences or mathematics, where you genuinely need the massive amounts of resources a university can place at your disposal in order to advance in the field.  If you like music, stay away from musicology.  If you like stories, stay away from literature.  If you like God, then absolutely stay away from theology courses. 

Of course, this won't be true for everyone.  If you genuinely believe the world operates on a sub-conscious level, that we are all controlled by philosophical ideas spinning in the vortex of our minds, then go become a cultural critic, and write a book about the dairy discourse perpetuated by entrenched power-farmers who seek to keep most of us in chains while offering us only delicious cheese to pay for the labor they steal from our very bones.  I, however, will go ask an evolutionary biologist why cheese is so fucking delicious, and where I can get some.

Same Old Song and Dance

I know at least one of you has asked yourself recently, "Hey, where's that jerk been?  You know, the guy who posts his opinions about things no one asked him about?"

Hi! Here I am!  I had been sullenly and silently debating with the only other individual who's opinions count as much as my own, and when I at last manned up and asked my reflection what he thought of overhauling Big Pretentious Words, he said that I should probably stop taking random hallucinogenic drugs handed to me by people on the street just stick to the what I know: everything.

Luckily for him, I agreed.  So today I bring you an introduction to the new original Big Pretentious Words.  No longer will I attempt to digest and regurgitate my experiences as a graduate student until I begin writing my thesis (t-minus 3 months).  Instead, I will be spewing superfluous opinions on Life, The Universe, and Everything, topics about which others (particularly Brits) have written far more concisely and cogently, but not nearly as arrogantly (except Brits).  I'd love to be known as the realest motherfucker on the face of the internet, but I'll probably only be thought of as the second half of that title when I'm thought of at all.  So be it.  Flying under your radar will allow me to sneak unseen into your brain avoid another class-action lawsuit.

To begin, I'd like to mention the rampant charades being paraded around that self-righteous time sink people call social media regarding the Japanese tsunami and ensuing nuclear crisis.  By the by, if you feel the need to mention the irony of me posting this blog to Facebook, first look up "irony", then look up "trite".

Back to the problem at hand: there is no problem, at least not for almost every single person on my admittedly, and understandably, scant list of Facebook friends.  Yet most of them saw fit to mention that they would be "keeping Japan" in their collective "prayers" while their "heart went out" to the Japanese people.  All of that is a lie.  Most of the people who were most vocal on Facebook probably spent their lunch break doing something like this:

"And then Charlie Sheen said his salad was winning!"

Meanwhile, on an aircraft carrier in the South China Sea, this was happening:

"What does the asshole from Men at Work have to do with this?!?"

If I learned nothing else from kindergarten (and I didn't), it's that actions speak louder (and hit harder) than words.  While it's wonderful that you say you're praying for the victims of the tsunami, that won't put clean water in their cups, or food in their stomachs.  It won't do anything except make you feel better about eating a $10 salad and let your friends know that you read/watch the news. 

And please remember that that being selfish doesn't make you a bad person.  It makes you a person, a member of the human species whose main goals are survival and reproduction.  But in the future, please spare the rest of us the guilt-ridden inner thoughts that drive you to update your status with "OMG Japan is fuuuucked...I feel so bad for them :(" when ten minutes later you're asking whether you should eat a grilled chicken salad or Indian food when you go to lunch.