I Go To School, I Write Exams, If I Pass, If I Fail, If I Drop Out, Does Anyone Give A Damn?
--"What A Good Boy", Barenaked Ladies
There was a time I could have actually made Boston my permanent residence and not just the city I tend to visit annually. The circumstances surrounding that tidbit are made all the more startling for two different reasons. One, I didn't even like the Red Sox that much at the time it could've happened and, two, it would have put me closer to someone I never thought I would see again.
It would have been in the third year at college. I was taking a full load of classes, working full-time at the bookstore, as well as trying to maintain what was a fairly new relationship with someone I had just met the previous summer. It was during this first semester for one of my hardest classes, a history class I believe, that I exercised poor judgment and fell back on one of my classic high school tricks.
I've always thought of myself as a fairly decent writer, even picking up recognition from classmates and friends about how my style lends itself to sounding intelligent even when lacking real intelligence. In high school I believe I got carried away with this attitude of invincibility when it came to my composition skills and started employing certain techniques that, while perfectly "legal", were not exactly kosher. I started utilizing longer words and phrases where simple phrases would have been just as effective. I never believed in the whole "KISS" philosophy, trusting in the notion that given the impression of sounding coherent and studied is half the battle in actually being coherent and studied. The minute you start becoming lacksadaisical in how you express yourself you start losing the trust of the audience that you actually know what you're talking about. If one were to look at my high school papers you would see a definite jump from how I wrote in my beginning years to how I finished off my high school career. Whereas I may have written something like, "I like to learn" in my freshman year, I started hurling away phrases like, "I have a voracious appetite for the academic process." I blame Avonlea and L.M. Montgomery. That one show is responsible for awakening my enamoration for wordplay and vocabulary. Thusly, because I so desperately wanted to give off the aura of being knowledgeable, I started utilizing the same quirks in my writing. I started to shy away from saying "you" and replacing it with "one" as in "one would be remiss if one were to merely glance over the curriculum" instead of "you would be wise to study harder." I started to NEVER use contractions. I started to write elliptically, whereas whatever I started a paper with, I was always sure to end something that called it to mind.
And, most dangerously, I started quoting myself. Whenever I got stuck for something witty and quote-like to start off a point I was trying to make, I'd fall back on starting off the sentence with the killer phrase, "a wise man once said, '....'" What only a select few knew was that I was that wise person and that I probably had made up whatever it was I was quoting at that instance.
That was all well and good in high school, but in college I got into trouble for doing just that in that one class. I suppose had over-utilized the technique by not only quoting myself but writing a majority of the paper on my own database of facts and figures and not necessarily from my research materials. However, my professor thought something was fishy about my paper and asked to see a complete bibliography, citing page numbers and such, rather than the title and author short-form he'd let the rest of the class get away with. If I could not provide a sensible and intelligent correlation between what I'd written and the materials I'd researched, he was fully intending me to be put up for expulsion, as plagarism and all its ilk was and still is severely frowned upon. Granted, my case would have been a case of anti-plagarism as I was far too little of other people's work and too much of my own, but it still felt like cheating to me too.
With that manner of stress hanging over me and while I was trying to mount a defense of my writing process, actually having to find books that backed up what I wrote as truth, I began to look at transferring to other schools "just in case." I was sure that I was going to be expelled because I'd been caught red-handed at basically writing an opinion piece and disguising it as a research paper.
That's how I began to look at Boston University. I fell in love with the school without ever having ventured into the city. I liked the way the classes were set up and taught. I liked the choice of majors. But I think what sold me on that being my new school was the fact it would have afforded me a much-needed change of scenery. I filled out the application and had it all ready to send out.
Had I gone to Boston two things would have probably happened, as hinted at in the opening to my post.
I probably would have fallen hard for the Red Sox sooner.
I probably would have bumped into Jina, my Jina, since, in a crazy, funky twist of fate, she started attending that school in the last years of my college career. How scary would that have been? To accidentally bump into "the girl," truly the one that got away. Don't get me wrong, I love Breanne to bits and pieces, and the fact that we never ended up married with kids does bother me, but I can't bemoan her as this huge regret. We probably make better friends than lovers, and the fact the way things ended up as they did, with us staying friends longer than some countries have been in existence, makes me think that I must have done something right. Jina, however, was honestly the girl I fucked everything up with. Not only did I tell her off... by letter... but I took up seventy pages to do it. Not only did I basically call her a waste of time, but I paid special attention to calling her entire family as well. And, just in case she harbored any thoughts of ever forgiving me, I burned almost everything she gave me and mailed it back to her, including birthday presents, video tapes, and pictures. The letters I kept, though, since that would have been like giving away a collection of Da Vinci's. I screwed her royally.
I never got my chance to patch things up with her. My professor saw my paper for what it was, a well-researched paper that was merely annotated incorrectly. I received full-credit for my paper on my way to passing the class on my way to graduating.
However, a piece of me always wonders what I lost by staying in school.
Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers
There was a time I could have actually made Boston my permanent residence and not just the city I tend to visit annually. The circumstances surrounding that tidbit are made all the more startling for two different reasons. One, I didn't even like the Red Sox that much at the time it could've happened and, two, it would have put me closer to someone I never thought I would see again.It would have been in the third year at college. I was taking a full load of classes, working full-time at the bookstore, as well as trying to maintain what was a fairly new relationship with someone I had just met the previous summer. It was during this first semester for one of my hardest classes, a history class I believe, that I exercised poor judgment and fell back on one of my classic high school tricks.
I've always thought of myself as a fairly decent writer, even picking up recognition from classmates and friends about how my style lends itself to sounding intelligent even when lacking real intelligence. In high school I believe I got carried away with this attitude of invincibility when it came to my composition skills and started employing certain techniques that, while perfectly "legal", were not exactly kosher. I started utilizing longer words and phrases where simple phrases would have been just as effective. I never believed in the whole "KISS" philosophy, trusting in the notion that given the impression of sounding coherent and studied is half the battle in actually being coherent and studied. The minute you start becoming lacksadaisical in how you express yourself you start losing the trust of the audience that you actually know what you're talking about. If one were to look at my high school papers you would see a definite jump from how I wrote in my beginning years to how I finished off my high school career. Whereas I may have written something like, "I like to learn" in my freshman year, I started hurling away phrases like, "I have a voracious appetite for the academic process." I blame Avonlea and L.M. Montgomery. That one show is responsible for awakening my enamoration for wordplay and vocabulary. Thusly, because I so desperately wanted to give off the aura of being knowledgeable, I started utilizing the same quirks in my writing. I started to shy away from saying "you" and replacing it with "one" as in "one would be remiss if one were to merely glance over the curriculum" instead of "you would be wise to study harder." I started to NEVER use contractions. I started to write elliptically, whereas whatever I started a paper with, I was always sure to end something that called it to mind.
And, most dangerously, I started quoting myself. Whenever I got stuck for something witty and quote-like to start off a point I was trying to make, I'd fall back on starting off the sentence with the killer phrase, "a wise man once said, '....'" What only a select few knew was that I was that wise person and that I probably had made up whatever it was I was quoting at that instance.
That was all well and good in high school, but in college I got into trouble for doing just that in that one class. I suppose had over-utilized the technique by not only quoting myself but writing a majority of the paper on my own database of facts and figures and not necessarily from my research materials. However, my professor thought something was fishy about my paper and asked to see a complete bibliography, citing page numbers and such, rather than the title and author short-form he'd let the rest of the class get away with. If I could not provide a sensible and intelligent correlation between what I'd written and the materials I'd researched, he was fully intending me to be put up for expulsion, as plagarism and all its ilk was and still is severely frowned upon. Granted, my case would have been a case of anti-plagarism as I was far too little of other people's work and too much of my own, but it still felt like cheating to me too.
With that manner of stress hanging over me and while I was trying to mount a defense of my writing process, actually having to find books that backed up what I wrote as truth, I began to look at transferring to other schools "just in case." I was sure that I was going to be expelled because I'd been caught red-handed at basically writing an opinion piece and disguising it as a research paper.
That's how I began to look at Boston University. I fell in love with the school without ever having ventured into the city. I liked the way the classes were set up and taught. I liked the choice of majors. But I think what sold me on that being my new school was the fact it would have afforded me a much-needed change of scenery. I filled out the application and had it all ready to send out.
Had I gone to Boston two things would have probably happened, as hinted at in the opening to my post.
I probably would have fallen hard for the Red Sox sooner.
I probably would have bumped into Jina, my Jina, since, in a crazy, funky twist of fate, she started attending that school in the last years of my college career. How scary would that have been? To accidentally bump into "the girl," truly the one that got away. Don't get me wrong, I love Breanne to bits and pieces, and the fact that we never ended up married with kids does bother me, but I can't bemoan her as this huge regret. We probably make better friends than lovers, and the fact the way things ended up as they did, with us staying friends longer than some countries have been in existence, makes me think that I must have done something right. Jina, however, was honestly the girl I fucked everything up with. Not only did I tell her off... by letter... but I took up seventy pages to do it. Not only did I basically call her a waste of time, but I paid special attention to calling her entire family as well. And, just in case she harbored any thoughts of ever forgiving me, I burned almost everything she gave me and mailed it back to her, including birthday presents, video tapes, and pictures. The letters I kept, though, since that would have been like giving away a collection of Da Vinci's. I screwed her royally.
I never got my chance to patch things up with her. My professor saw my paper for what it was, a well-researched paper that was merely annotated incorrectly. I received full-credit for my paper on my way to passing the class on my way to graduating.
However, a piece of me always wonders what I lost by staying in school.
Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers
posted by mojo shivers @ 12:33 AM
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