Tuesday, June 21, 2011

With four hours sunk into the alumni association, in what may be the most substantial donation my alma mater will ever shake out of me, I’ve decided to redefine what it means to give something the old college try. Previously I had set the bar pretty low–make it through a single event, so went the edict–and now, I’m committed to obtaining my permanent name tag before I call it quits. By that point, I figure, I’ll have afforded myself a bit more data to make an intelligent call.

I’m continually floored by how readily people volunteer for stuff. Who on earth could schedule events through December, then take minutes for a conference call, and then step up to decorate the venue? Jesus. Well, not specifically, since I was invoking more out of sacrilege, though I imagine He could also swing it. But the question stands. Is it love for the school? A desire to please? A pure, unadulterated hatred of free time?

Once again, it brought me back to the classroom. What drove students to raise their hands repeatedly? Sign up for extracurriculars? Produce copious notes? Collect not one major, but two? Actually take advantage of office hours? This kind of motivation was–is–alien to me. My shining moment during senior year, besides striding into a professor’s office to terminate my honors thesis, was when I realized I had cracked the nut on writing papers.

The formula was simple: know your core assertion, add quotes, and then sprinkle on some soapboxes from other professors, where appropriate. The most substantial time savings stemmed from how you collected those quotes. Rather than read a given book, as prescribed by the syllabus, you merely had to plumb the index for pages relevant to your argument. Now, you had to make sure you weren’t citing out of context, but that’s why Amazon reviews, “About the Author” sections, and dust jacket descriptions exist, right? I can’t claim credit for the index trick. I thought I got it from Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book, but the kicker is I didn’t read that book either, so I must’ve heard about it, then proceeded to misuse it.

I’ve been tired recently, marrow to soul, and I suspect it’s caused by a few things. There’s the manufactured extroversion, for one, but more likely that goddamned motorcyclist is to blame. To save you a click, all you need to know is that weather has been dry recently, which means every morning for the last two weeks has been a chance to rev the ol’ hog, like, a dozen fucking times before launch. But with a solid week of inclement weather on the horizon, I couldn’t be happier. I see those thunder cloud icons on Weather.com, nine in a row, and I rejoice over rainfall, like the heathens of antiquity.