Updates & Explanations 

Sorry I haven't posted anything interesting this weekend. I was really tired yesterday and couldn't summon up enough energy to write. However, I need to post something now that I've been meaning to include all weekend, then I have some more "real world" stuff to do. First of all, I'm now officially blogrolled on IMAO. Not the best timing, since I recently sent the monkeys from "Evil Monkeys" over there to harass Frank, but a good thing nonetheless. As Frank has stated, permalinks don't get you any extra hits, but it's good to be on there anyway.

Now, on to more important business. Remember that philosophy essay I mentioned a couple weeks ago? The one that I turned in literally 4 minutes before it was due after spending less than 4 hours writing it? The one that I wanted to keep confidential because it sucked so much?

Apparently I'm not a very good judge of my own skill, because the TA who graded it thought it was, in his words, "the best undergraduate essay" he'd ever seen. Okay. So, to sum things up, I thought it was possibly the worst thing I'd ever written, and the TA thought it was the best thing one of his students had ever written. I don't want to go off on a huge tangent about my personal life again (that ADD post was more than enough for one week), but this kind of thing happens a lot. Every time I think I've done something really terrible, a teacher invariably acts like it's the greatest thing in the world. I mean, he wrote comments on there like, "excellent point," and, "absolutely brilliant!" This has happened so many times, I almost feel guilty when I get an A. I even told him, "yeah, I wrote it the day it was due, but...I thought about it for a while." Of course, that "thinking" was a handwritten quasi-outline that I made between classes that same morning. It took about 40 minutes, and a lot of that time was spent staring out the window.

This could actually be an addition to the ADD rant, because it demonstrates another part of the disorder that you don't hear about: low self-esteem. I've read accounts of people with ADD who classify themselves as "lifelong failures" and say that they've never done anything meaningful with their lives. They always think that they haven't accomplished anything because it was all so easy, even if people appreciate their work. I feel the same way. For some reason, nothing I do is ever good enough, and I really do feel guilty when I get good grades for doing so little work. I feel like I should be putting more time into things, but since I don't need to, I usually don't. The same goes for larger things, like getting into college. You may be aware that Syracuse is a fairly prestigious university, and the Newhouse school is the most competitive. In addition, TV-Radio-Film is the most competitive major. As my peer advisor put it, "everyone who isn't in Newhouse wants to be in Newhouse." When I somehow got in, I thought there must have been a mistake. It didn't seem like I had done any work at all in high school, but I managed to do what many people have only dreamed of and get accepted as a TRF freshman (many people have to transfer later because it's so hard to get in the first year). I don't get it. I always wonder if my work would actually suffer if I spent more time on it. It seems like it would be kind of artificial and overedited, which is why I never write rough drafts if I don't have to. I think I mentioned this before, but everything I post for SIT is off the top of my head. I've never spent more than an hour on anything I've written here. That's the same way I do assignments. I sit down, start writing, and somehow pull an "A" paper out of nowhere. Strange.

Okay, I've probably bored you again, so I'll go ahead and wrap this up. I'm going to post the text of the philosophy essay I just mentioned, and you can judge for yourself whether or not it's any good. It does make a decent argument for a subject people usually don't bother to pay attention to, so maybe it'll make you think. Or maybe it will just make you drowsy. We'll see. My next post will be either some or all of the essay. Later.