At this point in the semester, I’m still gung-ho for academics. I look forward to my classes. I see my classmates as potential friends, not ranks in the hierarchy that starts at “too stupid to live” and goes up to “the lightbulb over your head hurts my eyes.” I do my readings, all of them, and underline key phrases. I vow to start every paper multiple days before it’s due. I take coherent notes that aren’t in haiku form, are low on profanity, and don’t get abandoned in favor of me-on-me straight sets of the Dot Game.

This state of being will last another two days, tops. It might be gone already; I write this having just turned in a response paragraph, the first official assignment of my semester, which reads like one of the less inspired works of a random statement generator. Perhaps the time has come to flip through my pristine and scholarly notes, all three pages of them, and sigh a sigh of farewell.

Foucault and Lacan:

Smaller words, please, or shut up.

One crane parts the sky.

Unnerving, isn’t it, how easily we can forget that academics are the whole reason we’re here? Or maybe by using “we” there, I make an ass out of you and me. Maybe, for the rest of you, the gung-ho period lasts clear through until finals.
Nah. I bet a lot of you don’t even have a gung-ho period. I bet you start work on the crossword before the professor can finish saying, “This is Class ###. Is everyone supposed to be here?”

What I want to know is, how do you change? How do you make yourself care about schoolwork when there’s a sunny terrace and boys playing guitar on porches, two-for-one Pokey Stix on Tuesdays, “The Simpsons” three times a day, naps to take? Useful or not (which is another debate in itself), how can schoolwork possibly compete with so many other great things?

Of course, that implies the cure for academic apathy is a life of bleak, hollow despair, and I hope that’s not the case.

How do you learn to care? Or is caring irrelevant? Maybe it’s just a matter of learning to kick yourself earlier, to keep track of assignments whether or not they seem important, to go to bed when the clock is still in double digits. Maybe it’s just a matter of telling yourself, “Hey, I don’t give a rip how little you care about stochastic processes. Read the chapter, do the problem set, and quit whining.”

Maybe everyone else has already figured that out. It’s crashingly obvious; I just don’t want it to be the answer. I’d prefer magic beans or something.

Abracadabra!

The Textbook Fairy’s wand waves:

sing psalms to schoolwork!

It’s so stupid. Being able to go to college is one of the biggest privileges around, a function of money and opportunity and a society that allows for careers besides farmer and child-bearer. And yet we whine about readings and skip class because we’re too hungover to find the building. (Again, “we” may be the wrong pronoun, but I don’t think it is.)

And I don’t know what to do about it besides work really hard, which is clearly unacceptable.

Maybe the real question is, how do you learn not to be lazy? And has anyone ever successfully done it?

Oh, well. I don’t need to figure this out now; it is, after all, still gung-ho season. So I have until about Wednesday to find the answer, except I probably won’t because, you know, figuring things out is hard work.

In the meantime, I’ll be making the most of my remaining academic zeal. Packets to read, alphabets to learn, papers to begin thinking about. . .

Ah, forget it. Anyone up for the Dot Game?

Four lines make a box;

write your initial in it.

Still, I will beat you.