Confidence in you, Is confidence in me, Is confidence in High Speed

The title is a little bit of a throwback to Coldplay's 2000 album Parachutes, but it bests describes my life right now.

I don't know exactly what to write about this time around because life seems to move too fast for me to keep up a blog with anything that I'm doing. This week we are scheduling classes. Already this week I helped with the Globe, WPPJ, USG (dear me BUDGET MEETINGS), and I still have 2 days of school, 3 of the general week, and SATURDAY is Halloween. (Please pretend it's Tuesday, for my sanity...)

My friend sitting next to me suggested spontaneity as a topic. I ask people for topics, but rarely know where to go with that. Same here, but I felt the topic on a personal level.

I'm not spontaneous.

Spontaneity is something widely considered a positive quality, but try as I might, it's something I could never do. Perhaps it's the late hour but lest I have these mixed up, there is a difference between impulse and spontaneity. I will act on impulse, but sparingly. I understand I overthink everything and while sometimes I miss out on things, I've been doing better at streamlining the process. That's how USG happened, and the Assistant News Editor position happened - an impulse.

That all being said, I deliberate everything like crazy.

My mind is soup. Goodnight.

Angry Roads Pricked With People Rolling Forward Like Onions

The post title comes from a song we played on our radio show, Don't Let Me Die At Coco's, an obscure song that I have no idea where it came from.

We're almost halfway through the semester. So that means it's almost midterm season. And time flies by like crazy.

So last time I posted on here, it was part of an English paper. I try to avoid discussing things that I'm assigned to in class, but I felt it would work well as a crossover. We got back the grades on these things earlier this week (or maybe last week, I can't tell anymore how time passes because down here the sun don't shine and the lights always flicker with a 1 a.m. overworked glow) and as is usual the professor made some comments on the whole to all of us.

She said she liked the blog posts better than the academic papers. So I want to attempt to explain why that is. In a phrase, blog posts are more free form. They're our own. That's what our teacher said, and I tend to agree. But to digress a bit, I want to talk about how the education system strips us of our personality and then tries to force it back.

I always had a bit of an issue with writing English papers. We were told for years that we aren't qualified enough to have opinions on subjects, thus everything we had needed to be cited within papers. Once I figured out that bit, my papers let my sources sing. I used their collective voices to prove points I myself felt but was unqualified to have.

This year, our English professor is saying that our essays don't properly reflect our own voices in the same way our blog posts do. Duh. Here I am, freely expressing myself without worry about form or elevated language or making sure I used academically approved sources to prove points. In other words, it was my work as a confluence, but not truly my own working opinions, And she wants us to change that within an academic sense.

Cool. So how do I do that when I've been trained I'm unqualified for any opinions, and all academic papers must be on the shoulders of these untouchable scholars? And why? What relevance does writing an academically cited and categorized paper have for me? It doesn't. I create content that at some point may be put in an academic journal, and then your force the next group to use your paper for their papers. It's a perpetual fight to stay relevant: a self-fulfilling prophecy. Let me just write a newspaper article already.

Speaking of, I'm now the Assistant News Section editor for The Globe, Point Park's Campus newspaper. So that's kinda crazy and I'm really excited about it!