"Polaroids of Classrooms Unattended"

I had forgotten what it feels like to be passionate for something, to be so in love with a project or an idea that everything else fades away into obscurity. That used to be my hallmark, and I've been missing myself these past eight months or so.

I blame college. A diploma requires a certian number of credit hours and a certain grade for each of those credits. Stark, methodical, assembly-line cold, like a hospital. The sterile, flourescent lights leave no room for anything else besides an increase in vocabulary. Memorized dates and figures? It is a mask, a façade, embarrassingly fake, and it should be criminal.

Readers acquired erudition without study, authority without cost, judgment without effort.

I read a hundred pages in a book today; I devoured them, hungrily aching for more, starved for the words laid out ahead of me. Do you know how long it's been since I felt this way? This feeling is the reason I'm majoring in English. But my day is choked with so many superfluous things, my major itself is so caught up in nothingness, in earning a diploma, that I can't.

Perhaps this is the reason I enjoy my midterms in my literature classes so much. My brain enjoys thinking a certain way, and finally, finally... in these tests, I can expand it, I can push myself in the way I love to be pushed. The classes certainly aren't doing it. I sit idly listening to discussions, unmotivated to participate in them. I want my own thoughts to be heard and expanded upon. I want to write papers and think until my mind could shatter from the effort, only to be saved in the last second by a single, effortless, transcendent thought that links everything together, and I can see the words and the pages lining up like dominoes before me. Then I hold the power, with a brush of my finger, to topple them all.