I'm not posting more because my little fingers are absolutely exhausted. I've crapped out written essays for five graduate seminars and the final essay for an undergraduate class in the last month, amounting to (significantly) more than ten thousand words, and my fingers, my brain, and my body are all exhausted. I haven't had a break since we went to Brussels, really. So forgive me if my efforts at writing are a little short recently.
I'm taking a travel writing class because the University of Colorado lovingly forces us to take classes that have nothing to do with our majors, weeding out those who are good at playing Student from those who either lack the critical capacity to excel at a wide variety of subjects or, more simply,don't give a flying fuck care. This is the same reason that I have (had) to take not just one, but two classes about the weather and a laboratory for it to boot. I study political science and a smattering of languages, does it really seem like I care about cumulus formations? Your answer is here.
So, anyway, I'm taking this class because it's full credit for the course in just five weeks, making my life in the fall a lot easier when I would rather be focusing on finding money wherever I can to save my little pennies (and small they ever seem to be) in anticipation of moving back to Portugal. I was going to take the other requirement for writing, because they insult your intelligence (read: charge you money you didn't need to spend) not once, but twice, except that class was the lower-division seminar and there was not a single, remote chance I was going to listen to an aging queen from the vaunted communications department tell me how to write killer sentences. Doing so would have been like handing wads of one hundred dollar bills to the university only to have them light them on fire and laugh right in my face. The travel writing class is, mercifully, less intellectually offensive, and so I decided to stick to the course and try not to be too late for riveting sessions of eloquently-put navel-gazing. It is more or less standard fare so much as class goes, but that's of less interest, and anyone with a reasonable amount of sense can understand that I'm happily plodding along – to say that I'm particularly invested in it would be an injustice to the entire concept, really. The readings are good, and I think I'll add them to my quickly-overflowing bookshelf after the course is over.
The thing I think I like the most about the class, however, is the group dynamic and all of the exaggerated introspective nitpicking that is involved in it, the professor gliding happily through material and most of the other students going along with it, interested as they are in the idea of writing about themselves and getting credit for it. It's a rather steep contrast from the political and more engaging environment that was (ironically) Católica for the last couple of months there, with even the students engaging in discussions on things relating to the classes we took together during break periods and afterward. In general, the class is particularly well-suited to Boulder and the cultural mannerisms that emanate out of it, the idealistic leftism and supposed cultural openness that fails to be much of either one of those things in actual practice. The group is mixed, including East-looking individuals, working-class people eking out their education in the expensive People's Republic, transplanted and vacuous students of Greek life organizations, individuals who use their participation time to attempt to show the rest their intellectual capabilities but end up repeating the professor's words in a more long-winded manner, and so on. Those who have gone to university in the United States will be immediately familiar with all of the above. Conspicuously absent are any minorities or those who spent more than just their childhood being raised in any other cultural context, save for perhaps our token quasi-foreign student who has been living in the United States long enough that no one would be any the wiser had she not pointed out this fact to us.
Herein lies the issue I take with the class, and on some level, Boulder more generally. What I sit for an hour and a half listening to is a group of people from socioeconomic backgrounds comfortably enough established to be paying to go to our university and affording the heightened cost of living in the town surrounding it without having to exist or more generally interact with others from outside of that same sphere talk about traveling and going to places as though they are objects to be tried or as though people in other places are somehow so different that their differences make them objects of recount instead of the individuals they actually are – profound revelations like "the people were so nice to me there!". It's the common problem you run into of people wanting to try a lover from another place as though they were a kind of food or wanting to do a country as though they're another level on your computer game. I've written my thoughts about this before on enough posts that they don't all warrant links. I suspect this not to be true of certain individuals (including our resident not-quite-foreigner), but for lack of their participation in class, I can't know for sure. I would like to hear their thoughts more, to see whether a better social understanding has sunk into someone in the room not responsible for our grades, but I'm not holding my breath. I could do likewise, but for the same reason that I hold little hope, I don't contribute much. Chicken, meet egg.
Granted, this is an entire blog dedicated to navel-gazing and my thoughts and formulations on traveling and my own experiences have evolved over time not entirely (or, perhaps, even mostly) outside of the realm of what I complain about, but to make a class out of it at least allows me to put that into perspective. There's a reason why travel writing serves a niche market, and it did not take me very long to figure out why.
I'm taking a travel writing class because the University of Colorado lovingly forces us to take classes that have nothing to do with our majors, weeding out those who are good at playing Student from those who either lack the critical capacity to excel at a wide variety of subjects or, more simply,
So, anyway, I'm taking this class because it's full credit for the course in just five weeks, making my life in the fall a lot easier when I would rather be focusing on finding money wherever I can to save my little pennies (and small they ever seem to be) in anticipation of moving back to Portugal. I was going to take the other requirement for writing, because they insult your intelligence (read: charge you money you didn't need to spend) not once, but twice, except that class was the lower-division seminar and there was not a single, remote chance I was going to listen to an aging queen from the vaunted communications department tell me how to write killer sentences. Doing so would have been like handing wads of one hundred dollar bills to the university only to have them light them on fire and laugh right in my face. The travel writing class is, mercifully, less intellectually offensive, and so I decided to stick to the course and try not to be too late for riveting sessions of eloquently-put navel-gazing. It is more or less standard fare so much as class goes, but that's of less interest, and anyone with a reasonable amount of sense can understand that I'm happily plodding along – to say that I'm particularly invested in it would be an injustice to the entire concept, really. The readings are good, and I think I'll add them to my quickly-overflowing bookshelf after the course is over.
The thing I think I like the most about the class, however, is the group dynamic and all of the exaggerated introspective nitpicking that is involved in it, the professor gliding happily through material and most of the other students going along with it, interested as they are in the idea of writing about themselves and getting credit for it. It's a rather steep contrast from the political and more engaging environment that was (ironically) Católica for the last couple of months there, with even the students engaging in discussions on things relating to the classes we took together during break periods and afterward. In general, the class is particularly well-suited to Boulder and the cultural mannerisms that emanate out of it, the idealistic leftism and supposed cultural openness that fails to be much of either one of those things in actual practice. The group is mixed, including East-looking individuals, working-class people eking out their education in the expensive People's Republic, transplanted and vacuous students of Greek life organizations, individuals who use their participation time to attempt to show the rest their intellectual capabilities but end up repeating the professor's words in a more long-winded manner, and so on. Those who have gone to university in the United States will be immediately familiar with all of the above. Conspicuously absent are any minorities or those who spent more than just their childhood being raised in any other cultural context, save for perhaps our token quasi-foreign student who has been living in the United States long enough that no one would be any the wiser had she not pointed out this fact to us.
Herein lies the issue I take with the class, and on some level, Boulder more generally. What I sit for an hour and a half listening to is a group of people from socioeconomic backgrounds comfortably enough established to be paying to go to our university and affording the heightened cost of living in the town surrounding it without having to exist or more generally interact with others from outside of that same sphere talk about traveling and going to places as though they are objects to be tried or as though people in other places are somehow so different that their differences make them objects of recount instead of the individuals they actually are – profound revelations like "the people were so nice to me there!". It's the common problem you run into of people wanting to try a lover from another place as though they were a kind of food or wanting to do a country as though they're another level on your computer game. I've written my thoughts about this before on enough posts that they don't all warrant links. I suspect this not to be true of certain individuals (including our resident not-quite-foreigner), but for lack of their participation in class, I can't know for sure. I would like to hear their thoughts more, to see whether a better social understanding has sunk into someone in the room not responsible for our grades, but I'm not holding my breath. I could do likewise, but for the same reason that I hold little hope, I don't contribute much. Chicken, meet egg.
Granted, this is an entire blog dedicated to navel-gazing and my thoughts and formulations on traveling and my own experiences have evolved over time not entirely (or, perhaps, even mostly) outside of the realm of what I complain about, but to make a class out of it at least allows me to put that into perspective. There's a reason why travel writing serves a niche market, and it did not take me very long to figure out why.
