Crazy-Whack-Funky Day

After two short semesters back in graduate school I have decided that academia needs to throw a giant party at least once a semester in celebration of mental illness! Yea! I mean honestly, some of my professors are interesting as hell but batty as a giraffe on a pogostick. Now let's face it, none of us is perfect. I certainly can't claim to be firing on all cylinders, but if passing a psychological analysis to prove one is free of mental illness was a necessary part of becoming a college professor I know at least the English department would not exist. This isn't necessarily a bad thing; obviously a lot of our most brilliant inventions and ideas have come from very disturbed individuals. Hemingway, Lincoln, Van Gogh, Beethoven, Woolf, Issac Newton, Charles Dickens, Winston Churchill...the list goes on forever. These were all great individuals that acknowledged their illness and dealt with it in a manner that allowed them to go on to do great things (well, except Hemingway--he shot himself in the face, and Woolf drown herself--pretty sure Van Gogh was a suicide too, but the point being that they offered a great deal while they were around). As I've been finding out with some of my profs and fellow classmates, there are quite a few crazies out there that wouldn't dream of acknowledging the fact that their certifiably nuts. In fact my own Creative Writing teacher--who is aware that I am bi-polar--confessed to me today that she also has dramatic mood swings but would never think of going to a therapist because she thought it would screw up her writing. I wasn't too surprised as she is the most emotionally fickle teacher I've ever had (and we bi-polar folks have somewhat of a gay-dar for mental illnesses), but I did think it was proposterous that she thought analyzing her life would somehow make her WORSE at writing. It almost seemed a bit hypocritical seeing as how she preaches to me class after class about letting go and going to deeper subconscious places in my writing.

I guess it isn't a huge deal, but I have realized as of late that human beings have a deep-seeded sense of what is right and wrong. This doesn't mean that it gives us a right to judge or to criticize or to set up society in such a way as to presume right and wrong, but honestly, where would laws even begin if we didn't have this internal sense? Or are they just based off of the early settler's Puritan values (because if this is the case we have some serious Church and State issues)? If there is no sense of right and wrong there is no way to argue for innocence or guilt. It's all just one opinion versus another. Why I bring this up is, it seems to me that a huge part of formal education is teaching the brain how to misbehave, right? When we're born we're born with the information we need to survive. If we were fed up to a young age and left in the wild, we would innately begin building shelter and gathering foods in a way that would increase our chances for survival. But in the "real world" it isn't this simple. There are rules and class-lines, gender-lines, racial barriers...hell we won't even give a guy pissing in a glass jar a quarter on our way out of eating a huge meal of junk food. So to survive one must go to school and learn how to appear as far from an original human state as possible. The better you dress, the more "educated" you sound, the more you are able to recite the things academia deems worthy, the better off your life will be. The irony is, as I'm finding out, that the people at the top making the rules are, as I said, batty as a beaver with a bowling ball. They're INSANE! Neurotic! Brilliantly creative, but ultimately living somewhere that is nowhere close to the reality the rest of us experience on a day to day basis, yet they are the ones devising the curriculum that stretches all the way down to elementary school. It's scary shit. Mostly rich white kids--all grown up--who think they have the power to control the world. And again, the irony is that they'll believe just about anything that seems to make sense. I recieved an "A" on a paper last week in a class that I haven't even opened the text for. TOTAL bullshit--and I get comments back like, "You seem to really grasp these concepts." If I do, we're in trouble.

I don't know what else to say, except that it amuses me. Life is just so damn weird and the older I get the more goofy it all seems, yet the more serious everyone seems to get. So I guess a little human decency and an open mind (and a sense of humor) are about all I can recommend. My rules are basically that if it isn't hurting anyone but yourself, knock yourself out. As soon as you start infringing on my freedoms, we're gonna have words, but otherwise...go crazy! Everyone else is.