Nah

Why do I bother analyzing anything? This isn’t a statement meant to suggest that I am jaded or questioning my choice in academic subjects. Instead, I’m genuinely curious about who the analysis is even for? Ostensibly, it’s first and foremost, for me. But the problem is that I don’t really care about the majority of content I analyze. I’ve read countless novels, excerpts, poems, magazine articles, short stories, essays, and have seen countless (well not really, I am still young after all) films, paintings, installations, buildings, photographs, sculptures, and on and on and on. But only a fraction, of this mass of creation I’ve been and continue to be exposed to, do I actually have any stake in. I can only be so emotionally and intellectually invested across a never-ending spectrum of art. Yet I still analyze.

Perhaps I do it for the grades. Good grades are important right? This semester, I took some pass-fail classes and found myself unable to just…sigh…let it go.

“I don’t really want to try in this class. I just want to pass…but I don’t want to turn in a shit paper…as like a self-standard.”

Is that what this is all about, the fiction that I’m smart? I don’t consider myself an intellectual. Instead, I classify myself as an ignoramus of many subjects, trained to be able to craft some sort of bullshit concoction in a reasonable amount of time so that I can at least extend the illusion for one more minute, hour, day, or paper. Maybe that is just what analysis is – an improvisational act meant to assure oneself of their perceived academic prowess. Then there is the argument that my self-critique, or self-analysis, acts as some vague form of the imposter syndrome, believing myself to be incomparable to great artists that preceded or proceed me. Of course there are my contemporaries as well. Students who I believe are genuine. Genuine what? I’m not sure; perhaps that is why they appear to be such fetishized versions of truth.

I know the truth I seek, or imagine, is nigh untouchable by mankind. But nonetheless I like to believe that there are people out there who get it. Perhaps not consciously, but in some inherent sense, whether they realize it or not, are free from the question of why do I do “x”. I think this freedom may exist. Nah.

Wow, isn’t this the best thing to be thinking about during finals week? Also, isn’t it great that this is not an original thought and my own perceptions aren’t enlightening in the slightest? Only adding to the mire of collegiate babble that suffocates every coffee shop and dorm. I imagine that everything I write now, academic papers included, is followed not by an empty “Oh, that is interesting!” but a candid, “Ya, I get it.” Perhaps I shouldn’t turn in my final paper. Maybe it will be liberating. But I probably won’t cause I’m a coward at heart. That is one thing I’m certain of.