white male consumer

This post is being written five minutes before midnight, Tuesday the 26th. You’ll be reading it at some later date, as I’m at my apartment with no internet access. Hopefully I’ll post it tomorrow, but I can’t make any guarantees since my Wednesdays are always packed.

Today was incredibly bizarre.

I contemplated skipping my first class, finally decided to go, but arrived late because I slept in a bit too long. We were doing something online, on WebCT (if that means anything to any of my readers). There were no chairs left. The four or five of us who had arrived last (and mostly late) were instructed to go to the next classroom and procure some rolling desk chairs. There was a class in this room, so we dawdled in the hallway deciding whether or not to interrupt. Momentarily our professor came out, scolded us and told us this was why we could be late (looking at me directly, disregarding the fact that it was my first offense). I wondered to myself how my tardiness had an effect on the number of chairs in our classroom.

She barged in, perhaps proffering some weak apology, and rolled out the correct number of chairs to us. I would have been content to sit on the floor. It’s carpeted.

My second class, I spent reading the material for my third. Near the end, however, the professor here (an amusing French woman with a marked accent) made all of us write our names on pieces of paper, and stand in groups of four so that she could take our pictures. This was so she could begin learning our names, all forty or so of us. It’s a large 100-level lecture-based biology class that nearly everyone is taking only for general education requirements. The idea that she’d even attempt to learn our names is sweet.

The third and final class of the day was spent discussing writing groups, and this eventually came to the conclusion that Thursday’s writing group workshops would be entirely optional.

I spent the rest of the day desperately trying to catch up on some reading and other assignments. I’m barely treading water on that front. My Buzzsaw article is not even begun. But after trying to get to sleep, laying wide-awake, I began thinking of some wonderful and worthwhile ideas. A lot of my best thinking comes in altered states of consciousness, which that sort of half-sleep that you lay in before finally nodding off certainly is. Usually I just forget about these ideas, but at this point, I need them.

Many are possible topics of writing. In this final year of college I hope to write some decent stuff. I need to get published more and discover that there is money to be had in all of this. Among the varied topics that I’ve thought upon and will probably need to write..

Myself as the writer. This is not debatable, it’s a set topic that will need to be written. It’ll be good to delve into the topic more thoroughly and concretely than I’ve had to in the past. I don’t know about the potential for publishing, but it’s worth looking into. I’m going to begin taking the initiative on this front, submitting stuff on my own.

Myself as the politically-aware / activist student. This is a very good topic for the next assignment in another one of my classes. I do not know of possible publication venues, but there must be a place.

Weed & Canada: what now? This was a joke excuse to write a(nother) pot paper, but it got me to thinking. High Times would be the natural publication / audience. I wonder how much political, analytical stuff they publish. I’d have to advertise on IthacaFreecycle for wanting to borrow recent issues of High Times to see.

Definitive look at Iraq-America relations. I’d need to limit the topic to fit into any sort of size constraints, but it’d be a good excuse to do some research, historical / analytical mostly, about the modern nation-state we know as Iraq. Possibility of getting published is nonexistent, but it’d be personally beneficial. Possible topic for one of my senior seminar articles.