sometimes, i just draw pictures

My academic success was hampered by several things—laziness, apathy, a poor retention of facts and figures. And, my later years in school were always hampered by the fact that I was generally satisfied with the B+. Sure, I could go for the A but I already know enough for the B+. It seemed like a lot of extra work just to top off an already quite full tank. This isn’t to say I am dispassionate about life or success, but that I am rather dispassionate when it comes to early British Literature. As an English major.

Sidebar defense: In my defense, I became an English major not because of a love of English Literature, but because I was pretty good at it. I mean, how hard is it? You read something and you tell someone what it means. This means this because it says so. Don’t believe me? Well, let me show you exactly where. Here, here, and here. The best part was poetry. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Except for the occasional Whitman or T.S. Eliot monstrosity, poems are like 20 lines long and have a title. “This poem is about sadness.” “I feel so sad, so very sad / I feel so very sad.” Then you write something about how this poem is about sadness because it says so. It does. Right there in it. See? After you have established that, you make a reach. First, apply the adverb perhaps and the verb suggest. “Perhaps the theme even suggests that his sadness is the sadness of God / man / God toward man / man toward God / man toward man.” I mean, perhaps. Who the fuck knows?

Anyway, other than personal flaws, I think that a large gap in my academic abilities lies in my inability to take good notes. Part of it is that I give myself too much credit. “Oh, you’ll remember that,” my lazy hand tells me brain, “I won’t write that down because you can just remember the year that Freud was born. We’re good.” But it also has to do with just the things my ear chooses to latch onto and the things it chooses not to. For example, it chooses to notice a grammatical error in someone’s lecture but not, say, the actual sentence he was saying. What did he just say? Well, I know there was a “who” that should have been a “whom” somewhere in there. Oh, the actual content? Yeah, I let that pitch sail by.

Still, my notes tend to be vaguely helpful to me—like a list of keywords from a conversation (once, in a class I wrote down “the heart of the matter” after my professor said “we’re going to get right into the heart of the matter of this chapter of Ulysses today.” I did not write what the heart of the matter actually was). They will spark some “oh yeah I remember talking about that” sort of thoughts in my brain. The real problem lies in when I write them for the benefit of someone else. You have two roads that we could travel down: the nonsense road (“the heart of the matter”) or, like the notes I took for a recent conference session I led, the useless road. At one point, I wrote something like “Museum arrow Schools and Groups arrow Teens.” I bet that was really helpful for our participants.

This also comes into play in taking a phone message. Well, I didn’t write down the woman’s last name, but I did write down the word community group about six times. I also wrote down her phone number and the number of teachers in her school, but not the name of her school. So, good luck! It’s a wonder I wasn’t laid off earlier.

Merry Christmas Eve, everybody!