Wouldn't You Believe It? It's Just My Luck.

Hello Blog,

Well, it's been a while. Life has been somewhat hectic for the past few months, and also I'm a very lazy man. I've had a fair amount of changes of late, but documenting them all here would turn this into a huge wall of text and no-one likes that. I'm hoping to actually start updating this thing more frequently, so at least it'll give me some material.

First up, University. It's been a weird experience, as someone who never really got along with education. I was extremely nervous at first, worried that it was all going to be beyond me and I'd get my profound stupidity conclusively proven. That didn't really happen, I found a lot of the material pretty easy to grasp. The introductory course is always going to be relatively simple, and many of the sections were on subjects that I find interesting.

Where I've hit a brick wall is studying things I don't care about. It's been a curious revelation that studying things that aren't really interesting is really freaking hard. A section of my first essay was on the French impressionist painter, Cézanne. I don't know how well you know me, mysterious blog-reading person, but those are not a few of my favourite things. The first part was about Cleopatra, which chimes with my keen interest in videogames and movies classical history. Ancient Rome is a fascinating era and I flew through that section, but writing about picture planes, composition and brushwork made me want to die. I found myself staring at a blank word document for half an hour, swearing and then going to play Minecraft. Minecraft is not part of my course. There is no extra credit for building a sweet mountaintop skull fortress.

I finally got the essay done (after many extensions) and got a pretty good mark for it, but I sweated blood over an essay that I could have totally half arsed. This is the crux of my dilemma, Blog. I'm facing the same situation with an essay at the moment (half Faraday/half poetry). I'm not the biggest fan of poetry in the world, but at least it's relevant to a literature degree. Faraday is an important historical chap and Faraday cages are awesome, but I just don't care about history of science. So my options are:

1. Half-arse the thing. The course is entry level and pass/fail. My tutor tells me that it's not too hard to pass really, and there are very easy guidelines to meet which leaves not much room for tutor input. There are some essays you can pass even if you are totally wrong in your answer, as long as you use the right terms, etc. This option doesn't really sit right with me though, if I'm honest with myself.

2. Work really hard on every essay and study my balls off. Yeeeaaah. This isn't going to happen, I have a full time job I have to be vaguely alert for, a full time girlfriend that I have to be watchful and cunning for, and a social life that I have to be drunk for. If I study enough to do really well on every assignment, one of those things will slip. I guess you could say I should let the social life slip a bit, but fuck you, Internet Person, what do you know? Incongruous outbursts aside, you need to let off steam somewhere. Also my friends are awesome and religiously read and give feedback on my blog, so why wouldn't I want to spend time with them?

3. ABORT! Or put it on hold at least. I can come back to it later, and either study something more in tune with my interests or give myself some time to adjust to my new job (foreshadowing!) I probably won't though, I'll probably just sack it off and wallow in delicious, salty regret.

I'm currently leaning towards half-arsing it just for the sake of passing. This course is a requirement for doing more or less any arts qualification, so I have to do it sooner or later, but honestly the workload is kicking my ass. What say you, Blog?