My Liberal Arts Education, or, What I Remember From the Enlightening Novels I Read Throughout Grade School

I hardly ever find myself inclined to read, though don’t get me wrong, I recognize the value and I strongly want to want to read.

But the public school system helped me loathe reading, by throwing all sorts of way-over-my-head books at me at a young age.  Seriously, you think I had even the slightest interest in reading Ethan Frome when I was in middle school?  I especially hated reading about historical events, whose settings were so utterly unfamiliar to me that 75% of the descriptions were lost on me.  It was hard enough to keep track of settings/characters in a modern story.  But reading about the 1800’s when I’m 13… seriously:

“Buford lay across the wide expanse of bucklechoad, whispering the hymn of an old culoolee while sipping on buttleby.  The swecrepts crawled around him, muskreants of what had chostled his nefferviant thoughts since Chastletown.”

Seriously, WTF?  This was my experience on every page of the books I was forced to read.  And you wonder why I didn’t have any motivation?  And you seriously expect me to context switch repeatedly by opening a fat dictionary and looking up every word I didn’t know (that’s right, no dictionary.com then folks), only to find a definition which contains other words I don’t know, or even worse—variants of the same word as the definition!?

Give me some Harry Potter.  Hell, I’d rather read Twilight than Ethan Frome, and that’s no joke!  I gotta learn to walk before I can crawl, please!  So, needless to say, I often didn’t finish my assigned reading, and even when I did, it didn’t stick with me much.  Let’s see how much I sincerely remember from some of them:

• Ethan Frome: There was some lady, and I assumed she was named Ethan Frome, but that sounds like a guy’s name.  I remember there was some sort of old carriage, so it probably took place in the 1800’s.  That’s all I remember.
  
• The Great Gatsby: I think that the Great Gatsby was a rich guy, like in the 20’s, and I believe there was a swimming pool and he shot himself outside it, but I think I only remember that from the movie, which I watched in class later.  There was a car accident.  I can’t remember if anyone died, but I think a lady did.

 

Dang, I gotta remember the ones for which I didn't see the movie, because I’ll only remember the movies.  So this rules out All Quiet on the Western Front and The Grapes of Wrath.

 

• Hamlet: Some prince went crazy and wanted to kill his family, or maybe that was MacBeth.  There was poison involved and he wanted to commit suicide at some point.
  
• MacBeth: Maybe the same stuff as Hamlet, except there was a graveyard and probably symbolism there.
  
• Heart of Darkness: There were jungles and some crazy guy who went crazy.  I think he was an ivory hunter or else the guy looking for him was, or just ran into them or something.  Colors were used as symbolism, or so my teacher told me.  The line “The Horror, The Horror” was something the crazy guy said.  There were boats going down a river or something.  It was probably in Africa.

There are many more, and some I remember a little more of (Like Crime and Punishment, which I could probably write a small paragraph about.)  But that’s enough for now.

Stupid web polls

Here we have a poll on cnn.com’s subsite, “Edge of Discovery”:

This is so typical.  Surveys like this should provide answers which are non-ambiguous and include everyone’s viewpoint, or at least virtually everyone.  But, like so many other surveys, this includes answers which are too specific and also leaves out many possible answers.  Here are some more reasonable answers they could provide:

A) Within 5 years

B) Within 15 years

C) Within 50 years

D) Not in the forseeable future

These answers still aren’t perfect, as they exclude the opinions of people who believe vehemently that we will certainly never land on Mars for whatever reason, and technically you could say that “within 15 years” is still “within 50 years”, etc., but they’re still much better.  Let’s look at the actual answers CNN provided:

#1 Never: Robots can do it

“Never” would be sufficient, although I suppose CNN wanted to weed out the people who are anti-exploration as well as anti-robot… or maybe it just wanted to acknowledge that robots will perform these tasks in humans’ stead, so as not to confuse the answerer.

#2 Within the next 5 years

That’s a sensible option.  Not at all feasible, but at least it’s an inclusive option.

#3 Not until a decade from now

Wait, so, exactly 10 years from now?  Or… does that include 15 years from now?  Please be more specific.  Does this mean “at least 10 years from now?”

#4 The year 2050

Excuse me?  Do you have some sort of crystal ball up your sleeve?  How did you pull out this year?  Does this mean that if we land on Mars in 2051, or 2049, then those who answered “The year 2050” are wrong?  How about “greater than X years?” as an option?

Pet Peeves

I so regularly think of Pet Peeves of mine that I’d love to have a centralized list that I can refer to.  Maybe I’ll create some sort of web site for that or something.