A Thing

So, I had thought I had gotten over the whole "originality crisis" after my sophomore year of college, which was riddled by angsty, meandering term papers and overly-verbose textual masturbation. So it should be no surprise that this post is going to be an angsty, meandering, overly verbose example of textual masturbation.

I'm sitting here, trying to write a short (one to two page, which is legitimately short) paper for my American Lit class. I suffer from a dysfunction where I'm compelled to google my paper theses immediately after I come up with them, in the hopes that nothing will appear, and my Thought will be proven Original. This never happens. Sometimes it's obvious; such is the case tonight, as I'm writing about commodity fetishism and the dangers of capitalism in Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth. Sometimes, however, the realization that one of your Really Good Thoughts is disgustingly old news is downright crushing. For example, for the past year and a half I've been semi-consciously putting together a theory about poetic violence as a response to boredom; at least three of the last six papers I've written have been about Baudelarian violence as a response to ennui in various modern and pre-modern texts. Last Wednesday, my British Lit teacher spat this tidbit like it was yesterday's leftovers. Everybody knows that violence is a response to boredom, and that poetry is violence. In retrospect, it was idiotic to think that I was on to something, but it's nevertheless incredibly disappointing to realize that all your Really Good Thoughts already got Thunk about forty years ago.

I've yet to find a cure for the apathy and intellectual depression that's brought on by the Originality Crisis. Most have suggested that it's unavoidable, since nothing's original anymore, which somehow doesn't make anything better. It seems that the best answer would be to avoid google, but somehow I'm not sure that ignorance is bliss - walking aroung acting like you're the king of everything is only entertaining when nobody can prove you're not. I'd rather be aware of the possibility that I'm intellectually bankrupt than be the laughingstock of the educated community at large. To some extent, old good news is still good news, and I oughtn't feel ashamed that other really smart people have the same really smart thoughts that I do.

That was nice and inspirational, but as self-advice, it's fairly empty. I'm perfectly aware that my distress over not being the first to do or think of everything will continue to be near-crippling in its effects. What I've so far been able to avoid is complete and utter nihilism; the "why bother if it's already been said" - which I think at least has an optimistic ring to it. I've reached a point of almost transcendent self-awareness. I can pretend that I'm Hot Shit, even though I know I'm not, just because I'm still fairly sure that I'm Hotter Shit than most of my peers. My Hypocritic Oath (c. Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins), taken young, allows me to be perfectly contradictory in everything I do and feel great about it - except for, as I said, the crippling anxiety that plagues me in my paper-writing.

I think that, in the future, I'll continue to post intellectual musings, as this silly little web log (or "blog," as it's now called) offers a perfect textual space to clear my head: no one reads it, and if they do, I can claim sanctuary since I'm young, stupid, and a blogger (and thus inherently dismissable).

Kade Out!