At Least I Am Not Writing a Thesis

by Lauren Drayer

There are many things to complain about when it comes to your academic life. Your professor has questionable logic, he assigns one hundred pages of reading every week, and his class is based on the premise that you will fail; your lab partner spells the most surprising words incorrectly, she never remembers what time she was supposed to meet with you, and she keeps changing her mind about the font she uses in her emails. The smallest little things—and academia is nothing if not an aggregate of small things elegantly orchestrated into a master concept called a major—can get in the way of the big picture. They cloud your perspective: it is hard to project yourself a semester into the future when you are currently worried about whether you professor intends to fail you this semester because you deserve it or because he feels like it. The little things also prevent you from sleeping well: they nag and nag at you until all you can see when you close your eyes are all the little failures of the day. Most importantly, they prevent you from enjoying that burger you’ve been craving—who enjoys a burger when they have to rewrite their paper outline for the fifth time? That being said, at least you’re not writing a thesis.

The truth is that I did write a senior thesis. A very long one. On the biochemical characterization of antibodies. But that’s not what I am talking about. I am talking about writing a thesis in a department purposefully geared toward emotional pain: the Humanities. Humanity means the human race, or human beings collectively. It also means humaneness and benevolence. Academically, the humanities are the study of literature, philosophy, art … all things that are at the core of human beauty and creativity. It should be intuitive, it should feel good, it should reflect our energy, our capacity for good. It should feel human—good-human. But there is nothing good-human about the humanities. At their core they are vague, violent, mean.

There is this thing in law that dismisses regulations entirely if they are too vague to be reliably obeyed and enforced. The actual term is “void for vagueness”. We should be able to dismiss the humanities as a whole on that premise, because there is no structure within this area of study that would allow any practitioner to reliably produce a good analysis of literature, art, and especially philosophy. Why especially philosophy? Because philosophy is not even properly rooted in words; it exists in our minds as an abstraction of ideas that few have intelligibly translated into documents such as the Nichomachean Ethics of Aristotle. Just kidding; that book is unintelligible. Which further proves my point that philosophy rarely yields a structured response from anyone. Not even the Great Thinkers. Thinkers should keep their thoughts there, in their heads, in the space directly surrounding their bodies—not on paper, for it is there that it infuriates me the most.

So, above I have addressed why the “vague” portion of humanities is a problem. My conclusion, more or less verbatim, is that “it infuriates me the most.” My next point has to do with violence. We all have preconceptions of violence. Homicide comes to mind, police violence, battery. But obviously this is not the sort of violence that we notice in the humanities. It is far more subtle, because the humanities have mastered the art of quiet warfare. It comes in the form of an essay you thought was about Monet, when it really is about income inequality of Latino lesbians with lupus. You always, always get tricked into a carefully convoluted web of knowledge that is neither here nor there, all disguised as an essay inconspicuously titled “The Straightforward Explanation of Monet’s Paintings”. See? It is violence of the most sophisticated kind: directed at the reader wholly and personally.

Lastly, I need to address why I think the humanities are mean. There isn’t a very well thought out opinion there, so I won’t discuss it in any detail whatsoever.

In conclusion, when developing a humanities thesis, the student has to surmount the vast vagueness of his topic, realize that his writing will cause physical pain to his readers, and he has to understand that as a result of his work people will view him as mean, and probably avoid him in the future, both in the short and long-term. We all have many complaints about our academic experience, but if we are lucky, we are not humanities students, and at least we aren’t writing a thesis.

Lauren Drayer lives in a small town and thusly writes about small topics.

Diatribes of an Aging Computer Nerd

by Ben Stark

When I was your age I had to walk FIFTEEN MILES to laugh at computer stuff—and on a Saturday afternoon when my minutes ran out on NetZero, and I couldn’t think of any new, original Juno email addresses, but I absolutely had to download the latest Limp Bizkit single from Napster, the library was my only solace. Sure, they watched me like a hawk, I only got an hour, and their poorly maintained installation of Windows ME made Netscape lock up every 4 minutes, but dammit, I had to get that song somehow.

“What are you doing?!” the Librarian barks, looking over my shoulder.

I attempt to quickly close the LimeWire installation program but it is too late. She has seen me. The fire in her eyes burning, all the while she’s thinking, “Why don’t you shoplift music from a record store like a normal person?”

“You can’t install programs on this computer!” she snaps. “That’s against library policy!”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, I’ll just put it back how it was…” I wiggle the mouse, waiting for the computer to unfreeze, “As soon as it stops freezing, I’ll fix it.”

She frowns and walks away. Later I can hear her chatting with another librarian, “I don’t even know how to turn the damn thing on and these kids come in here and they know everything about it and the world wide net. Back in my day, if you wanted to learn something you read a book!”

_______

I come from a generation who grew up in a time when computers suddenly became affordable and this newfangled thing called “the net” appeared and no one really knew what it was, but we all knew we wanted it. Computers couldn’t fit in your pocket back then. There weren’t laptops as thin as a pencil. There was no Wi-Fi. There was no cellular data. No, our computers came in gigantic metal boxes, everything connected with cords, and getting on the Internet involved a phone line and an esoteric box with blinking lights that made horrible screeching sounds as it attempted to make a digital handshake with your ISP.

This is a generation whose dads finally buckled down and spent $800 bucks on their first 300Mhz Pentium computer and 15 inch CRT monitor so the family could have the Internet, but really so they could look at pixelated GIFs of porn when everyone else was asleep. We had dot-matrix printers that took paper on a “roll” with holes on the side to feed it through. Our first semblances of a tablet were the Palm Pilot and the Apple Newton—two shitty handheld devices that used a stylus for input and that no one really liked.

When I was a kid, our mail boxes would fill up with AOL floppy disks and CDs. We got them glued to the inside of magazines along with cologne samples. Stacks of them were available for free just about anywhere you went. We got so many disks people started coming up with different ways to use them. Need a coaster? AOL disk. Need to tile your pool? AOL disks.

8-year-olds didn’t have cellphones back then. When us kids left the house, our parents just trusted that we would stay out of trouble and come home for dinner on time. And we usually did. Because the Internet was so boring and shitty, we actually spent most of our time outside the house. I used to go to the coffee shop and get free refills all day while I wrote in my notebook and listened to burned CDs of stolen music I had spent several days trying to download.

It was a simpler time. A time when technology was awkward and bulky and no one was sure how to use it so we just left it at home and let it collect dust. There weren’t flatscreen TVs  at the grocery store bigger than the one in your living room yet. The NSA wasn’t tracking our Google searches and Facebook posts. We didn’t have supercomputers in our jacket pockets or on our wrists. Plus, you know, 3D Doritos. Am I right?  

We didn’t… Oh fuck, my Apple Watch says I have an appointment in an hour. #brb #toodles #lol #TotallyFuckingOnFleekRightNow

Ben Stark is a creme egg who does computery things, amateur photography things, YouTube things, and sometimes donates bad writing to underprivileged online magazines.