Mosaic Life

Just a few more days

So I’m nearly done with this session of the summer semester. Now I just have to write like crazy. (I suppose it’s to balance out the reading.) At any rate, I have to write a paper on The Great Gatsby and the twisted American Dream, an essay on the history of Christianity from its origins to the time it became legal, and an essay on the “calamitous” fourteenth century. Fun stuff! Wish me luck.

Sarcasm seen as evolutionary survival skill

I’m evolved, yo. What with my heavy use of sarcasm in everyday life. According to this article:

People with dementia, or head injuries in that area, often loose the ability to pick up on sarcasm, and so they don’t respond in a socially appropriate ways.

It’s easy to imagine how sarcasm might be selected over time as evolutionarily crucial. Imagine two ancient humans running across the savannah with a hungry lion in pursuit. One guy says to the other, “Are we having fun yet?” and the other just looks blank and stops to figure out what in the world his pal meant by that remark. End of friendship, end of one guy’s contribution to the future of the human gene pool.  

So my sarcasm proves I don’t have dementia. Sweet!

One of those update blogs, sans crusty eye talk

I’ll be finished with my first session of summer semester in exactly one week. I’m pretty excited about that, because I feel like I’ll finally have a chance to breathe. This session has seemed exceptionally brutal, even compared to last session when I was taking a language. I have three papers to write before Thursday, so we’ll see how that goes.

Next weekend I plan to visit my sister and the babies. I can’t wait to see them; I hear Dawson has become quite a chunky monkey (outweighing his sister by nearly a pound), and that Rylan still spends much of her time sleeping. I’m going to be taking Saturday classes starting next session (after July 7th or so) until fall semester is over. Definitely not looking forward to getting up early on Saturdays.

And then I’m going to be visiting California June 30 to July 5. Brandon is staying another week afterward for work. I’m really looking forward to the visit, especially since I haven’t been back since we moved. I’m hoping to spend a lot of time being lazy and getting sunburned on the beach. Good plan, right? We also plan to see friends/family, so that should be a good time.

I’m mostly looking forward to having time off. It’s been a while since I’ve taken a whole week of vacation. It’ll actually feel like summer, even if it’s only for 7 days.

Crusty eye update

I know, the title totally has you wanting to hear more. Anyhow, a while back I blogged about how my tears burn when I cry and that my eyes get really crusty, so much that I can no longer wear contacts. Welp, I went to the eye doctor Saturday, and he said that I probably have developed an allergy, or my eyes just produce too much oil. Glamorous! So he prescribed these eye drops (that health insurance will cover) called Pataday that are supposed to stop my eyes from producing gook that dirties up my contacts. He also recommended that I wear one-day contacts, which of course will be more expensive, but I figure won’t be so bad so long as I mix things up by wearing glasses half the time.

So this week is a trial period with the contacts and eye drops to see if I can handle them. If so, I may be able to wear contacts again regularly. Yay!

Is stupidity a possibility?

So after reading this article, I got to thinking about whether or not some people might not be smart enough to get a bachelor’s degree, and how not everyone should be awarded one just because they paid to go to college and went to classes.

So I mentioned it in class last night, which was a brilliant idea, since most people share the belief that anyone can get a bachelor’s if they work hard. No one was willing to admit that some people just might not be smart enough. That not everyone has comprehension skills, not everyone can grasp concepts that are required for a degree. Instead, some launched into speeches about how our education system sucks. People aren’t reading like they ought to. Parents aren’t spending time with their kids. Kids aren’t encouraged to excel. But no one was willing to admit that some people just don’t have the intellectual capacity to earn a degree. I suppose it’s the American way; you can do anything if you set your mind to it and if you work hard. Here’s a quote from the article I mentioned above about a woman who the professor had to fail:

Ms. L. had done everything that American culture asked of her. She had gone back to school to better herself, and she expected to be rewarded for it, not slapped down. She had failed not, as some students do, by being absent too often or by blowing off assignments. She simply was not qualified for college.

I had faced this issue last semester in German when we discussed how the German education system works. Basically, by the time a kid reaches middle school age, it’s decided whether they’re capable of being doctors or being janitors based on their academic achievements. They’re sent to different schools accordingly, and it’s very hard for a kid to get into a different school, even if they excel. Of course, the class thought this was ludicrous. How can you judge what a kid is capable of at that age? (A point which is valid; I think it might be more fair to start them in different schools in early high school so they can begin learning job skills.) And, they asked, why shouldn’t each child be told that they have the potential to become whatever they want to be?

I was the only one willing to entertain the idea that maybe this wasn’t such a bad system in theory. I mean, reality can be painful, but is it so bad to be realistic with expectations? I realize that some kids don’t test well, or don’t do well in school because they’re distracted or for other reasons, but I don’t get why it’s such a crazy idea that there are stupid people in this world. And when I say this, I realize it sounds harsh. But I think it’s stupid that workplaces now require bachelor’s degrees that really shouldn’t. Do you care if the assistant manager of the grocery store has read Aristotle or knows the different parts of a cell? Will this knowledge be used in any way at his job? It all seems silly to me. But obviously, the majority disagrees.

Girls with glasses

Brandon and I were talking about how he’d be going to an “indie” concert Tuesday night with friends but without me, since I have class.

“Should I still wear my wedding ring even though you won’t be there?” He asked jokingly.

“No way,” I replied, “I’d hate for you to miss out on the chance to hit on some indie girls. Here, I’ll even give you a line: Hey baby, I noticed that you wear glasses. I too am an intellectual with highly developed individuality. How’s about we mock mainstream music somewhere quieter.”

“Perfect.”

The trouble with Scott

So since my last few weeks have been consumed with reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s work, I’ve had a lot of opportunity to analyze him. Therefore, I will now detail the results of my musings so that you too might know exactly what went wrong with Fitzgerald. I’ll skip the formality of calling him by his last name and call him Scott, because now that I’ve read a good deal of his work I feel we’re tight. It’s fairly well-known that many things in Scott’s writing were true to life; he often lifted conversations and perhaps whole people from his life into his stories. So I feel pretty comfortable in judging much of his attitude by the characters that often share the same characteristics and ideas in his work.

I warn you that I’m not going to take great pains to ensure facts here, but to the best of my knowledge and from what I know from class, it’s close enough for me to do a deep psychological analysis. Plus, I’m qualified to do so, because I claim to be. That’s enough, right?

First, let’s get to know Scott (with a little help from wiki). He was born in St. Paul, Minnesota. His mom was rather domineering and belittled his father for not making a lot of money or being successful, and she held it over his head that her father supplied most of the family’s income. They weren’t poor by any means, but they weren’t rich, either. Scott would spend the rest of his life feeling that he never had enough money to be comfortable. Scott was smart, but he didn’t excel at school. He attended Princeton for a short while, and upon leaving he had a dean write a letter that stated he left because of poor health, not academic reasons.

Scott had himself an ego. He was very bright, and he knew it. This caused him to have unreal expectations of himself. As you’ll see in many of his stories, such as “Head and Shoulders” and This Side of Paradise, his characters were prodigies and also expected to do great things in their youth. The problem with Scott and many of his literary characters was that there was an expiration date on success. One had to accomplish great things—academic success, acquiring a popular and desirable woman, becoming famous—while still being young and beautiful.

Speaking of being beautiful, Scott knew that he was. Or handsome anyway. Much like nearly all of his male characters, he had a firm grasp on his strengths and weaknesses when it came to his appearance. This is a characteristic that one might often find in writers, as writers are by nature observers. They need to be able to accurately size up a person and put them down on paper. Scott felt pretty confident in his appearance, and combined with his wit, he had a fairly high opinion of himself for the most part.

Now comes the trouble that affected him quite a bit. It’s part of the plot that repeats time and again in much of his writing: poor boy falls in love with rich girl, can’t win her. Scott’s first love was a rich girl from Chicago named Ginevra King. And you’ll never guess how things turned out with her. He fell in love with her, she appeared to love him back, but in the end she married a man that afforded her a comfortable lifestyle. And who could blame her, really. I mean, back then, women didn’t go to college or work to better their quality of life. They had one shot: bag ‘em a rich man. So anyway, one can definitely see Ginevra reappear in Scott’s writing, especially as Rosalind in This Side of Paradise.

And of course, there is Zelda Sayre, daughter of a supreme court judge in Montgomery, Alabama (where he was stationed). She wasn’t rich, but his lack of finances did prevent a marriage. However, a week after his first novel was accepted to be published, they married in New York. And then they commenced to making one another miserable until one was crazy and the other dead. Zelda and Scott fought like cats and dogs. They knew how to push one another’s buttons. They cheated on one another, teased one another, made terrible accusations against each other. Basically, they acted like spoiled children. The money that Scott made was spent as soon as it came to their hands. After Zelda gave birth to their only daughter, Scottie, she had an abortion, maybe more than one (this was originally alluded to in The Beautiful and Damned but cut out). She obviously didn’t want any more kids, but one can only speculate as to the reason. I mean, it was advisable not to bring any more children into that environment, but the usual reasons for that sort of thing, such as being out of wedlock, or perhaps not wanted to go through the pain and weight gain of pregnancy, but she was married and had given birth before. So, go figure.

Another trouble with Scott was that he wanted what he could not have, and of course, that applied to women. If a woman rejected him, she became an object of obsession. Suddenly she would have a mystical quality about her, and his memories of her would be glorified and above anything that they might possibly have been (think Daisy in the Great Gatsby). If a woman accepted him, she wasn’t as desireable as he might have thought. It also certainly helped if the woman was well-sought after by other men, popular, and wasn’t afraid of kissing within a short amount of time.

And now for the clencher when it comes to the trouble with Scott: he loved his booze. A good many of his stories have raging alcoholics—Amory (This Side of Paradise) went on a drinking binge after Rosalind’s rejection, and Anson (The Beautiful and Damned) drank himself into a wheelchair. As I said earlier, much of the incidents in his stories are reflected from his life. Apparently, he was an obnoxious drunk. Though Hemingway loved the drink as well, he didn’t like being around Scott when he was drinking, and went so far as to ask Max Perkins (their editor) not to let Scott know where he was staying when he visited Paris because he would get them into trouble. Hemingway actually accused Zelda of encouraging Scott to drink so as to sabotage his writing. And Zelda accused Scott of having a homosexual relationship with Hemingway. So yeah, they didn’t get along either.

Unfortunately, all of the troubles that Scott had culminated in his early demise. Scott died thinking that his books had not been successes. This Side of Paradise was popular but did not give him the fame/fortune he desired, The Great Gatsby seemed to go over the heads of readers at the time, and really the only thing he was successful with was his short stories. Remember the expiration date that I mentioned in the beginning? Well, his was coming up, and he hadn’t attained what he thought he should. He considered 30 old, 40 to be past the time that anything good could happen, because by then a person is ugly and spent. And so he drank. He drank because he couldn’t hold on to that excitement that one gets when they first fall in love, he drank because his wife was a harpy, he drank because he hadn’t been successful. And he had a heart attack and died at age 44.

I guess his time was up. His love/desire for fame, success, youth, riches, and acquiring the dream girl seemed to crash right into his tendency to drink his problems away along with his inevitable aging. And that, my friends, is the trouble with Scott.

Walking uphill both ways through the snow

Things have gotten pretty busy. For most people, summer is a slower season. Kids are out of school, there’s more time to relax, etc. Oh, but not me. My work gets busier, I’m taking some rather demanding classes, and it gets hard to have to turn down opportunities to hang out with people whose summers are actually slow. But, such is life right now. Fitzgerald and ancient Rome, for now, own my time. But it’s good. Next summer will be different.

However, by next summer, well, spring even, we’ll know where Brandon is going for his doctorate. I really hope we stay here, because moving sucks, but I also want to remain close to my family. I would be dissapointed if I stayed here for three years but had no time to really spend with my family and then moved away. Hopefully that won’t be an issue.

Right now I just have to focus on keeping it together. Just make it through the week, get through the homework, get through overtime at work. Rely on caffeine to keep me awake when I need to be and benadryl to keep me asleep when I need to be. It kind of bothers me that I’ll only have gotten my bachelor’s after all this, when most kids didn’t have to try nearly as hard to do so. It makes me wish that I could get a higher degree for this, something between a bachelor’s and a master’s. However, if anything, it’s looked down upon if you don’t finish your bachelor’s in the traditional way. People think you either weren’t smart enough or didn’t have enough money to do it the “right” way.  And there’s nothing I can do to change it, so I might as well not dwell on it. But to be honest, I’m sort of ashamed that I don’t have my bachelor’s yet. I stay quiet about it, and avoid telling people that I’m in school because of the inevitable next question, are you finishing your master’s? No. I should be. I want to be. But I’m not. It sucks because I should be proud of myself, proud that I’ve done this myself, that I’ve worked so hard. But it’s hard to go against convention. At least when it’s over I’ll have two years of experience as well.

I sort of pity my future children, because my God am I going to have a chip on my shoulder when this is done. It will be my “walking through the snow to school every morning” story. I can see myself lecturing them, telling them that they better get scholarships, because your mom and dad worked their way through school and they can, too. Of course, that won’t be true. We’ll pay for them, if possible. But we won’t tell them that.