My World Lit professor is all over the place and it's driving me mad. I've decided that the whole issue of last week is completely unremarkable, at least for the most part. Perhaps i am taking it all too personally, too seriously. He didn't even ask me about the Cornel West project again this week. In fact, last week all he did was ask me to research it which I did but this week I got to class expecting an elaboration of what I am expected to do with this project and got absolutely nothing. Maybe he forgot? I wouldn't put it past him to forget something. I am thoroughly disappointed with the level of disorganization of this teacher. He is also very difficult to understand and I'm not sure he actually writes lesson plans, it seems that he relies entirely on the student's feedback on the assigned readings to run a two and a half hour class. This makes for a lot of dead air between any actual teaching & his inability to answer questions is just comical. For example, I asked why it is that Odysseus' mother is sent to Hades in the Odyssey - what had she done wrong to be sent to Hades? (to be honest I knew the answer, I had learned in my philosophy class last semester that in Greek mythology Hades is not like the Christian hell meant only for sinners, but it is simply the place where all souls go after they die. I was testing to see whether my inability to understand him was due to my confusion with the content or his inability to explain/teach/get a point across. His answer was comical to say the least. He went on several different tangents about Homer's depiction of Hades and the life of Odysseus' mother & he even ended up talking about Dante's Inferno for some time and finally he did answer my question but it came disguised in a bunch of absolute nonsense. I feel as though that 2.5 hours of lecture are a complete waste of time & that I learn way more with my text book and note book in the library.
Thankfully, he doesn't seem to be intent on singling me out as much anymore but one weird thing did happen tonight that made me wince. He was speaking about the way Zeus is seen as an all powerful, controlling god who can pick and chose whichever woman or goddess he wants and he says that Zeus could say "I want that woman...& bam, she is his." & when he said that he totally, flat out pointed at me. I feel like that was more ridiculous than anything and I'm not even going to venture out into thinking it meant anything at all, there is no way anyone could be that stupid, but the awkwardness ensued after that & the girl beside me gave me this look like "WTH was that about?"
I don't know but I am thinking it was nothing, meant nothing and that it is best I just forget it.
I probably won't drop the class even though I am not doing so well with this teacher, I need the class, the credits and I love what we are reading so i will deal with this inconvenience for the time being.

Not until Facebook were we given this sort of stage to basically say whatever we want to our friends at any time of the day. We can literally update our friends on every aspect of our lives in real time. Say how you feel, what you are doing and whatever is on your mind and you can just about guarantee that at least 10 of your friends will read it. So I guess given that much power, some people will begin to misuse it and my friends are definitely guilty of that crime. These are the top 10 types of Facebook statuses that I see from my friends.

1. The I’m going to use my FB status as a day planner status . – “Class at 9:30-1045, 12:30-1:45, lunch, meetings, gym and then go out to see Avatar with my roomies! yay!"
2. The lyrics to a song (good mood) status – "I got a feeling that tonight’s gonna be a good night."
3. The lyrics to a song (bad mood) status – "Hate is a strong word, but I really really really don’t like you!"
4. The hyper-intellectual philosophical/poetic quote status - “The unexamined life is not worth living” - Socrates
5. The cliché status–Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get. You win some, you loose some, you just gotta roll with the punches and seize the day, because everything happens for a reason.
6. The vague bitter-sounding status indirectly directed at an ex - I gave you the best of me but I guess you just couldn’t handle it, but I’m sure I will find someone who will. Your lost buddy!
7. The cry for help – Feeling pretty lonely right now, probably just eat some Oreos and watch Grey’s Anatomy with Mr. Fluffy for the night.
8. The time of the day status- "Good morning fb gonna be a great day.…. On lunch, can’t wait to get off work and get out of these shoes!... Goodnight fb, time to take it down."
9. The TMI status – "Sitting on the toilet"
10. The bold-face lie status– “Doin Homework”

Have you noticed any of these Facebook statuses on your friends list? Have you ever noticed any others?

I don’t think I’ve just realized this, but It’s definitely more obvious to me now as I read through blogs, that people are very vain and prideful. Maybe it is one of those natural human tendencies, maybe it is one of the seven deadly sins, I don’t know. All I know is that blogging is by definition a vain activity and its almost impossible to escape. I mean think about it, what do you blog about – yourself right? What you did yesterday, what you’re going to do tomorrow and how you feel about life in general. Some of us even go as far as to post pictures of ourselves up on our blogs and then blog about them, so not only do we blog about our lives, we blog about the way we look, how much weight we gained since last week, how much we love the color of our eyes or our new hair cut – It’s vain!

Even if all you blog about is TV, movies or music you still find your way into being vain. You blog about your favorite movies and TV shows, your top 10 favorite songs of all time and how they made you feel the first time you heard them.
We spend hours daily writing about nothing else but ourselves from our point of view. The “real-life” equivalent of that would be if you went to a party full of equally vain people and you all spend the entire night taking turns talking about yourselves, starting every sentence with "I" and being very self-absorbed and when you are done all the other self-absorded people in the room will try to relate but really all they’ll really be doing is making your entire situation about them. They’ll go
“Oh, I can relate because that has happened to me before and here’s how it went for me….” And then of course, they will begin to tell you all about themselves in the most vain way possible.

I guess its not really all our fault though, this website is set up to foster vanity. You’re given an entire page to write about yourself, you make friends and you get people to subscribe to you, its all about you. Even the features of xanga are at fault. If timestamping isn’t the most pretentious and prideful thing in the world, I don’t know what is. You write a blog (probably about you) and you think its so damn wonderful that everyone must read it, not just the people who were online when you wrote it but also the people who come on in the next few hours. So this vanity thing has driven you to paranoia, you are so proud of your ramblings that you are actually afraid that someone might miss reading them and so you do everything in your power to make sure that doesn’t happen.

Pictures obviously aren’t a feature that is unique to xanga or any other blogging website but it is quiet vain if you think about it. Where else in our lives is it acceptable to go around posting picture of yourself on a regular basis. Like, ( I could be wrong on this ) but no one has pictures of themselves hanging up at their desk at work or around their bedroom. High school kids don’t put pictures of themselves up in their lockers (do they? That’s a whole different story) So why is it normal for us to create this website and plaster it with pictures of ourselves as if we might somehow forget what we look like.

On our blog we tend to write as if we are the center of the universe. The rulers of our own little world, on our own imaginary stage. We begin to think that our opinions are the end all and be all, the law and we will fight to the death to defend them. I won’t lie; I am also guilty of taking part in this “vainity fair” posting all my pictures, blogging constantly about my favorite subject of all time – me. But I guess that's what blogs are all about. If you are totally against self absorption you've come to the wrong place.

So what do you Blog about? Has Xanga (or another blogging/social networking website) made you vainer?


Just for the record: I've given up the daily blogging thing. I actually stopped the day I went back to school for Spring Semester. So you can probably guess why I stopped. I’ll still be around on the weekends or whenever I have time.

See you when I see you!