05 February 2009

Oy

I truly want to avoid, as much as possible, my blog becoming simply a drain into which I pour my feelings of anxiety. My life really is more than just nail-biting and overthinking things. Having said that, (by the way, I actually don't bite my nails) I will continue to express what I originally intended.

I just realized that my night at work was far more distressing as it seemed at the time. Right now I'm all out of sorts and genuinely wierded out by society overall. A few things contributed to this disruption.

Firstly, tonight we hosted a forum between two really accomplished scholars and journalists, and the title was something like, "Homegrown Hatred: Anger and Alienation in America." Actually that's the title verbatim, I ended up googling it because my paraphrase didn't nearly do the original any justice. Continuing on... The event ended up for the most part being a revealing discussion on the so-called "religious right" and how the group is slowly infiltrating the American political system as well as preying on the emotional despair people are currently experiencing in this time of economic crisis. Personally, the only news for me were the statistics and stories of abortion camps and creationist museums. I pretty much agreed with a lot of things they discussed before they talked about it, although I personally had more of a patronizing view of the pitiful 'evangelicals' that entailed much less conspiracy theory. Nonetheless, the discussion really hit me and just completely wierded me out. Not so much in the way that I'll say something trips me out, but instead in a manner much more disconcerting. I somehow felt violated by the ambitious role these bible-thumpers are trying to gain, all under the guise of over-used abstractions like 'love,' 'forgiveness,' and 'compassion.' I'm feeling a little emotionally queasy right now just thinking of it.

Stemming from the mentions of despair amidst economic crisis is the next event that really threw me at work. After waking up nearly every day for the past few months and reading about more and more hundreds of thousands of people getting laid off from their jobs, I found out that two people I knew in passing from my own job were now unemployed. My 'boss's' fears of losing his job are now a little more valid, and that's just really unfortunate. It's really a troubling and saddening thing to think about. But I suppose it happens, and it will continue to happen. I've never really considered myself much of an anti-capitalist, I think being anti-something is less productive than being pro-something different. I've always considered socialism to be a wonderful proposition in theory- one that isn't exactly suitable for the greedy, selfish nature of humanity. But lately I've just had this sick feeling in my stomach reading about all these disgusting banks that are led by monsters of men.

This brings me to another thing that's been on my mind, which really shouldn't be that big of a deal. I just don't know how I feel about the stimulus bill in congress and it kind of bothers me. I can't decide whether I'm for it or against it, and although reading the text of it is probably one solution, I have neither the time for that nor the understanding of the potential long-term effects of some of the programs. The other day (at work of course) one of our guest artists, Erin Cosgrove, quoted the German communist Baader-Meinhof guerilla group when she said, 'Capitalism must fund its own demise.' These people said such in the 60s and 70s and now the statement has become reality. Every taxpaying American is throwing their mandatory contribution into the capitalist pot to help save the collapsed system. The problem is, I personally don't think throwing artificial money at a broken economy is going to fix it. It seems as though we must construct a new financial system that isn't built on top of an economic wasteland.

Finally, another thing really troubled me today as I was flashing my friend her study cards in her efforts to reassure herself that she had in fact memorized the date, medium, artist, title, location, and commissioner of 500 individual frescoes and paintings. Part of the bother was that her teacher was only going to test her on five of them. Just five. Out of five-hundred. This really rubbed me in an undesirable way. As we were sitting there at the museum, surrounded by art professionals who had already obtained their degrees, I wondered how useful memorizing all this information would be to my dear friend when she becomes a fabulous curator of contemporary art. Sometimes during my terms I feel like I'm part of a big scam that's going on all over America that is the entire college system. It's just so silly that we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for a piece of paper (okay more than that, an experience), and after spending all of this money we can get a nice happy wonderful career and make a 'good living,' so we can do whatever we want to 'actually do' with out lives. And in the mean-time we all have to compete with each other and out-work each other while also striving to be as ethnic and marginalized as possible. Because if you're a white male, your hard work clearly isn't as hard of work as that of an anorexic, ambiguously gendered, puerto rican child abuse victim. Anything he produces is superlative to yours because the minorities he inhabits are worth their weight in gold. Why am I even talking about this? I don't really even care about ethnic profiling.

But I do care about the fact that I can never find a parking spot for my car on street-sweeping day.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think you're amazing nic.

Johnny said...

An undergraduate's diploma is really only a report card that reads "A for effort".

Doesn't really matter what you do in school, just as long as you do it.