Depressed. Feel like shit. I feel stupid. I'm angry that I've had so much work to do for the past three weeks that I couldn't prepare well for these pointlessly early midterms. I'm equally angry about receiving bad grades for one-page "essay" assignments in my introductory rhetoric course, where we're apparently supposed to constrict an entire argument into one paragraph, and an entire close reading into another. This is stupid. Fifty pages and the thread and the justifications and all those movements are not going to fit in one paragraph. There is no point in writing out a close reading of a little tiny passage in one paragraph. It is just not happening. "Boy, Hobbes hates Aristotle a lot!" No, that is frankly... it's stupid.
I hate this feeling, that I'm unlearning everything I know. I'm not good at writing essays anymore. I can't see anything. I'm not very perceptive... I just don't feel good.
I'm so tired, and I'm so lonely, and I really do have a terrible time when a bad streak comes along. It's been three weeks of awful, thanks mostly to not being able to pick up most of my textbooks in time--one week waiting anxiously for those books, another week working desperately in order to not be so damnably behind (during which I got sick), another week trying to study for this coming week's exams and get a little tiny bit ahead, read a little, curb the sense of exhaustion.
Is it that it all seems so trivial nowadays? Is that it? I find myself skipping steps because I don't want to write them out; they're exhausting. The answers are implicit. None of this is hard. Not really, truly hard. The thing they call close reading is how I read pretty much all the time, anyway. I never stop. I underline, I annotate, I write things out, I take serious notes, I don't quit looking at a passage until I really, honestly understand it. The metaphors and images aren't lost on me... it just doesn't seem important enough to spend all sorts of time writing it down. Because I'm not showing that I've learned or understand anything. I'm just telling people what any old fool could find with a flashlight.
I hate this feeling.