February 2nd, 2001

Join me now as we take a trip, a trip to a wonderful, magical place, full of mystery and beautiful visions. No, I'm not talking about that strange drug song "Magical Mystery Tour" by the original teenyboppers, the Beatles, I'm talking about a most singular experience: The Making of the Modern World 2: The Great Classical Traditions. I know I voiced my extreme dislike for general education requirements in my initial rant, but I believe that this hatred needed to be explored and brought to your attention.

First of all, this class is not just a normal 4 credit course, but a 6 credit writing course, so if I royally screw up somehow, I've destroyed my gpa completely with one class. It's not bad enough that my engineering classes center the curve exactly over C, my general education requirements get to royally screw me up as well.

All that said, the actual lecture part of the course isn't so bad. Led by the illustrious Professor Page Ann Dubois, we learn each week about just how far we still have to go until we reach a sexual freedom anywhere close to what the ancient cultures had accomplished. Hell, the Sumerians believed that a city "just wasn't a city without prostitutes" (Yes, that is a direct quote.), and the Greeks? Well they had entirely too much of a fixation on phallic symbols and sex in general. I mean, they had vases and urns with depictions of dildos and mass orgies on them for god's sake! (No, I didn't misconstrue what the pictures showed, this was confirmed by the professor...)

The thing that really bugs me about this course is the writing section. It seems as if we had a semi-decent course, and someone decided "Hey, lets royally screw the students and make them write stuff that has little or no relevance to what we're doing." I mean, the whole thing seems like it was tacked on a couple years after someone thought up the idea for this class. I mainly just hate writing papers. I don't like having to write a set amount, I like to ramble, let the stream of consciousness flow where it will, traipse down and ride my train of thought to it's illogical conclusion. But no, we can't write like that, we have to follow this crazy convention called MLA format, which I see as the legacy of the Typewriter coming back to haunt us with crazy Underlining titles and putting cites inside the text instead of having the word processor make nice little footnotes/endnotes for us, at just the right height from the bottom of the page.

Oh, and of course, my section where I turn in my essay happens to be on a Tuesday. And not just Tuesday, but early Tuesday. Not that there's much wrong with this, it's just that it seems that everyone has the damn thing due on Wednesday, thereby getting an extra day to slack off. And not only that, but the TA's seem to take a fiendish delight in massacreing innocent papers and reducing them to the rubble that is "failure." Of course, there is no right or wrong answer as long as you prove your position well. Roughly translated, this means that you're SOL if your TA happens to not agree with the direction you're coming from. Remember, your arguments have to be convincing here people!

Anyway, I just recieved word from upstairs, and this word is "Quitcherbitchen." So I'll write my papers like a good boy now...

This is SMiH(Did I mention essays suck?) signing off.