Towards the end of my freshman year of college my English professor, after grading one of my papers, commented that he was impressed by the improvement I’d shown over the course of the semester. This praise brought me no joy. In fact, the comment upset me. I hated the paper I’d just written. I hated writing it.
It’s only in looking back that I can find a better understanding of why I was so against the compliment. Overall, my college writing was terrible, and this is something I eventually became okay with. I preferred it, even. Because I didn’t enjoy writing in college.
I actually went to some pretty crazy extremes with some of my papers.
For a book review of a book I did not read I introduced my paper with something like this: “I feel that the review below sums up my thoughts on the subject better than I can do.” Then I pasted said review, cited it correctly, and ended my paper. Again, I did not plagiarize; I gave the guy who wrote the review proper credit, endorsing it with “This guy said it better than I could.”
I got a 17% on that review because “that seems to be the percentage of work you put into this paper.” Fair enough. Then in class, without calling me out by name, the professor said, “I’m not so sure some of you seemed to understand point of the paper.” No man, I understood completely.
I don’t say this with the hope of receiving applause for a rebellious spirit or whatever. I say it because I truly believe I was protecting myself from hating learning and writing. I didn’t want to give up my soul. I knew at a pretty young age that college wasn’t going to be for me. Not because I wasn’t smart, but because I was.
The best papers I wrote in college were in philosophy class as well as one in an Introduction to Education class. For the philosophy class, we had to write a one-page paper at the end of every week. There weren’t any rules. “Just give me your thoughts on what we covered this week.” That was fun. The Education paper I did well on was my “Philosophy of Education” paper. I guess you see the theme.
Strangely, I’m not really a big philosophy guy. I’ve got a bit of a love-hate relationship with philosopher types. In fact, I’m pretty sure I would have been in favor of executing Socrates. Cut it with the open-ended questions, dude. That schtick gets real old and real annoying real quick.
All this sounds like I prefer to express myself as freely as possible. Sure. But putting it that way makes me think of stoner hippies writing bad poetry. Which brings me to another paper I wrote.
This one was in Poli-Sci class and it was on the legalization of weed. At the time (2012), I was a normie-conservative, so my paper built a case against legalization. Eventually, when I got to my libertarian phase, I changed my opinion on the issue. Now, I’m essentially back to my 2012 opinion.
In that specific paper I remember running out of what others would have considered at least semi-valid arguments and eventually concluded with, “And from what I can observe, most advocates of legalization look and act like lazy potheads, therefore it’s a dumb idea.”
So what’s the point of all this? First, I’ve remained pretty consistent in one area of my life: I’m going to write what I want to write, and I’m not going to write what I don’t what to write.
However, as it pertains to politics, anecdotal evidence points to some flip flopping, doesn’t it? But one thing has remained consistent as far as my personal political ideology flies: if you looked stupid, in other words, have bad physiognomy, like, say perhaps you look like a pothead, or you’re a man who likes to wear dresses, then I’m not going to be on your side.
Lastly, with regard to my love-hate with philosophizing, allow me, if you will, to put my own philosopher hat on and end this with a deep thought of my own:
If college writing and its subsequent professor proponents were tossed in a blender with some potheads, then spun around into a slop that was then forced fed to us by federal agents dressed in drag, I think we’d have a perfect encapsulation of what modern society is.