End of term

I'm glad that this semester is ending. I think this has perhaps been my very best semester since my first semester. I was a music major in my first semester and I never missed any classes, but my second semester really destroyed me. I started doing drugs and skipping class and I really lost myself. Now four years have passed and I really feel like I'm finally starting to put myself back together; I've missed relatively few classes, I've quit drinking and other recreational drugs for two years now, and I quit smoking at the beginning of this year. I do still feel incredibly lost most of the time, but since I've been able to harness the focus that I've been lacking over the past four years, this semester has really been a breeze for me. In a way I'm kind of sad that the semester is ending, but then again I'm getting a little tired. Sometimes I think that if we didn't have these long breaks I could learn so much more and I wouldn't feel exhausted by the end of the semester. This semester I don't feel so much exhausted as I do infected by the prospect of a break. For instance, I got an 88.25 on my last Chemistry exam because the semester is coming to a close and I didn't want to dedicate as much studying as I had for previous weeks. On all of my other exams I've made scores from 99 to 103.5. It makes me think that the exhaustion that we feel is totally constructed because we see a break coming up and since we're so lazy, we want it to come earlier than it does. The truth is, I haven't really had to try as hard this semester as I have in previous semesters, yet the classes are all harder. I'm not sure why that is, but I think it's because I've not divided my focus so unevenly into all of the unnecessary and unhelpful areas into which I used to. Sure, my social life isn't that great this semester, but I'm married and I think I meet most of my social needs by talking with my wife. In fact, if it weren't for my wife I'd probably still be destroying myself with drugs and alcohol, so I think that I really have her to thank for fixing me up. I'm not sure what's going on, but this has really been a very wonderful year for me.

Uh-Oh!

Crap! I just remembered that I'm supposed to be posting in this blog every week! I'm not even sure how many weeks it's been that I've forgotten, but I guess I'll have to suffer the consequences.
I think I've not talked about Great Expectations yet, so I'll just say that I really loved the book. I couldn't stand Pip for the most part because of how idiotic he was, but I ended up forgiving his jackass behavior in the end. Right now I'm reading Mrs. Dalloway (I know... I should have finished it last week) and it's already one of my favorite books. There is a problem with it however because very little actually happens yet it tricks you into thinking otherwise. I think it's because of the way she uses the stream of consciousness in her writing. Despite that strange problem, I think it's a fantastic book and I enjoy it much more than I've enjoyed Joyce's "Ulysses" and "A Portrait of the Artist" because it maintains a unity of plot whereas Joyce's stream of consciousness stuff just drives you mad. I'm not sure what to do about missing these blog entries... Crap...

Essay Two... Ugh...

I think I made a point of my distaste for Victorian writers in a previous post. This week I had to write an essay over the Victorian period and I feel like I've never written a worse essay in all of my life. I just can't find anything interesting or thought-provoking about the Victorians; everything they write is so dimwitted that I begin to wonder if they were sprucing up their wine with lead as the Romans did. Their poetry is as bland as bad prose and their prose is as lengthy as epic poetry but without saying as much. Ugh.... I hate the Victorians.

What a crazy world this is.

So while I was reading about the rampage committed at Fort Hood I've come across something that is so strange to me that I haven't any way of truly describing it.
It's been referenced in the news that the shooter Nidal Malik Hasan contacted and was praised for his actions by Imam Anwar al-Awlaki. I tried to read the actual blog post by the Imam, but the site won't load due to its timing out, but I did discover a strange book by this Imam entitled "44 Ways to Support Jihad". While I was reading it I was struck first of all by how stupid all of this sounds with regard to violence, but I remember once a dear friend of mine and also another professor each telling me in different circumstances that the Qu'ran frequently asserts that one of the greatest things a follower of Allah can do for the cause of Islam is to become deeply educated in all modes of knowledge and to spread that knowledge as well as the knowledge of the Qu'ran. Here's another pretty interesting fact: the Qu'ran was written by Muhammed's older wife and has numerous feminist references throughout such as the assertion that women should be greatly educated and very well respected. I think I've gotten off track.
Anyway, I've looked through the Qu'ran and have only seen two references to Jihad and neither of them include specifically any sense of violence other than that of a mental struggle. Furthermore, as I understand it, Jihad is separated into two divisions: little Jihad and big Jihad. I may have these backwards, but as far as I can recall, big Jihad refers specifically to taming your own mind and the intellectual struggles one has with the acquisition of new knowledge. Ultimately, this should somehow relate to the follower of Islam's understanding of Muhammed. As far as I can tell, the only reference to struggle is purely poetic and is as I've said a metaphor for that profound sense of unease we all experience as we begin to drink from the endless cup of knowledge. Little Jihad refers to helping others cope with that internal struggle or by somehow instilling that internal struggle in them and then helping them understand it.
With this in mind, I just can't understand how people like Imam Anwar al-Alawki could so easily pervert something that seems to me so beautiful. Islam was supposed to be a step forward from the negative aspects of Christianity and Judaism (which ironically also originated from perverse interpretations) yet it has consistently been brought down by those who neglect to see that most of all it is a book whose message is one of a sort of unfortunate love for all mankind.
I just don't understand why Imam Anwar al-Alawki thinks the way that he does about the treatment of our fellow man. I agree that the treatment of Nidal Malik Hasan by his peers was absolutely atrocious, but to me the only action befitting Islam by one so mistreated as Nidal Malik Hasan would be to grow stronger in his faith by this treatment and use that strength to educate those around him about the good notes of Islam and perhaps the similarities between his religion and that of those who ridiculed him. Violence does nothing but harm the message that was recorded by Muhammed's wife, Khadija. I deeply wish that this Imam could open his heart, eyes, and mind to this message since he obviously has the ability to talk to people, but until then I don't know what to think of this poor frightened man but to pity him for his lack of insight.
I do not prescribe to any religion, but I do believe there is beauty in all of them and I wish that more people could see it too.

Victorians...

Ugh... Victorian poetry is absolutely dreadful! Actually, the more that I read poetry in English, the more I am forced to admit that English is a truly disgusting language and is totally unfit for the production of beautiful poetry. There is just no way to soften the rhythm or the sounds of the English language in order to make poetry appealing in any of the traditional senses; the only way that poetry can halfway be decent in English is if it relies mostly upon language's natural ability to produce mental images. Rhymes and rhythms in English mostly get in the way of what little is left in the language to make poetry beautiful, so they should just be left entirely out. This alone should be enough reason for the education system to place greater emphasis on the learning of a second language.

Frankenstein

So I read Frankenstein this week and I've got to admit that I am not very impressed with Mary Shelley's writing. The fact that she is the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft really gave me a lot of hope that her writing would actually be good but the unfortunate fact is that her writing just drags on and on. This wouldn't really be a problem if she used all of that unnecessary writing to try to prop up the actions (such as the creature's eloquent speech) with some sort of believable logic. I think the book would have been much better if the creature had first learned everything that Frankenstein knew and then decided through his dealings with humanity that he wanted to wipe human beings off the face of the earth via some awesome weapon. It would then be pretty cool if he created a Mrs. Creature and they struggled through the post-apocalyptic wasteland against the few surviving humans with the help of liberated barnyard creatures. Haha. That would be awesome!

Romanticism

I'm glad that we're studying Romanticism this week in my Brit Lit II class because I've just encountered a lot of Romantic literature in my World Lit class and I've yet to read any British Romanticism. It will be interesting to compare Tolstoy's work, which I am to begin this week, to that of the British Romantics. I'm pretty ignorant about Tolstoy, but I think that he was an opponent of Romanticism which is why I think it will be so cool.

On a side note, I really wish that there were some way to eliminate these unnecessary adjectives that I tend to use such as "interesting" and "cool!" It really bothers me that so much of our conversation is filled with these absurd modifiers! Every time I hear somebody remark, "oh that's interesting," I just want to scream, "Oh yeah? Well what's so damn interesting about it?!" But if I did that I'd be a hypocrite because I too am an abuser of the phrase and I can't stop! It's like we fill the air with that phrase just because, as Boron insists in Umberto Eco's "Baudolino" (I would have underlined that but I can't figure out how to do it in here!), of "the disgust that Nature would feel it it left a vacuum."

Reality!

So today I dropped the wife off at work and came home to clean my apartment. First of all, at the beginning of every semester the apartment gets pretty hectic; seriously, you can't take a single step without getting book all over your foot or stabbing yourself with an ink pen. So cleaning was an absolute necessity. But whatever.
While I was cleaning I stumbled upon my Insure Oklahoma/O-EPIC bill and noticed that there were actually two bills in the damned letter! Initially, I had seen just the one and saw the due date as 9/05/09, so I wasn't too worried about it, but today I saw that the other bill was due nearly 20 days ago! The punishment for failing to pay a bill is termination of you O-EPIC insurance, but I hadn't received a letter yet saying that my insurance was terminated, so I panicked and assumed that I had still some time to take care of it. So I wrote a check to the bastards and placed it in the mailbox. I then checked my mail and, lo and behold, there was a letter from O-EPIC stating that my insurance has been terminated! I was so pissed that I screamed many vulgarities in front of laughing children and their jackass insured parents.
I came back home and wept a little and decided that weeping would do me little good, so I turned on a new live set I'd downloaded from Chicago Afro-Beat Project and resigned myself to finishing the cleaning of my apartment. I was grooving to the rhythms and almost forgot all about my insurance problem when suddenly the recording started chanting "You can't go to doctor 'cause you're uninsured!" And they're correct...

Brit Lit II

Well, here is my blog for Brit Lit II. I suppose I'll have to write in this thing. This just feels strange.