01-12-2006
Drowing in my own Apathy…
So I loved my schedule for this term. I never had class before 1 and as late as 4:30 some days. There price for all this wasn’t too terrible: a single night class with an awesome prof. In my experience, night classes are only hard if one begins the day early. I figured going 4:30-8:30 isn’t any worse than 12 to 4. So I have this awesome schedule and 16 credits. If you’ve known me for any length of time, you know this is the point where things go horribly wrong. I arrive at my night class on Monday, to discover to my dismay that it’s being split up into an undergrad and a grad student section. I wouldn’t particularly care except that a) it encoarhed on my perfect schedule and b) we weren’t informed until Mon, well into the add drop craziness. So I speed up hillward, muttering pissy obscenities at random passersby. I spend the next hour or so doing schedule permutations (for me crafting a schedule that is academically useful, intellectually satisfying, and sanity maintaining is something of an art and my magnum opus had just been bulldozed.) Of course, by this point, all of the courses which could have been used to resuscitate it are closed. If I had be informed before the academic musical chairs began, I might have been about to do something about it. I should note that what happened is clearly not that fault of the professor in question who has bent over backwards to be apologetic and accommodating.
After some consideration, I decide to just drop a course without replacing it (I dropped a required CS course, to keep taking the unique phil course). On balance, this is actually going to make the term go much smoother (three coding intensive CS courses may well have totally fucked my head). The only down side is that it drops me down to 13 credits, which will increase the credit deficit towards my getting a dual degree(a 6 credit gap which wouldn’t even exist, if pitt let me keep all of my AP credit, grumble grumble).
Now all of this may seem fairly pointless to all of you and it is. But here’s the kicker: I just can’t bring myself to give a damn. I’m going to be doing the easiest semester even with real class only 3 days a week (UHC seminar doesn’t count cause it’s too much fun) and one of those days with only one class. This is an unprecedented level of slackerdom for me and I just don’t care. Even more disturbingly, this decision may well compromise my getting a full dual degree, which has been my primary academic goal since I got here and I don’t care. I don’t care about work(as in the “job,” which no longer pays me) anymore and it takes a tremendous effort to pry myself away from my pile of unwatched DVDs to make even a token effort at work. And in a twist which reveals the truly bizarre nature of my psychology, what bothers me is not the lack of motivation, but that the lack of motivation has cease to bother me. My apathy is growing but so is my guilt towards being apathetic. I feel lost not in the sense that I don’t know what to do with my life, but that I might lack the wherewithal to get the fuck out of bed to do it. Maybe I’m just still suffering post fall trauma burnout and the effects will wear off eventually. I can’t help feeling that there’s been a more permanent shift and I’m not at all happy about it. Or, more precisely, I’m unhappy about the fact that I’m not going to do anything to change it. In theory, posting should become more frequent with my new-found free time. In practice, I’ll probably just watch tv instead.
-CI
