This will come as no surprise to most but I'm feeling very ready to quit school. The comps are a strange creature. At first I felt pretty excited to read a lot of these books. The reason I chose York was so that I could tailor my curriculum and read and study what I want. I've bumped up against the canon, however, and I can't seem to find my way out of it. Boring white men saying the same thing over and over. Yet, I feel like I have nothing more to contribute than they. I think to myself - if this is me trying to make my life meaningful, I'm really off the mark.
This struggle is coupled with the feeling that reading alone in a room and grading mediocre papers and tests for students who kind of hate where they are and what they're forced to do is not how I want to spend the rest of my life. Even if it was a meaningful and important contribution to the world. A professor that I respect - one that guided me and encouraged me and eventually became a colleague - once told me that her friend, a long-time professor, walked into the chair's office one day, plunked down her pile of grading and said, "I can't grade one more paper. I'm done. I quit!" This sounds like an urban legend and I can attest that most teachers would find this story somewhat unbelievable. At the same time, most of us are on the brink of madness most of the time reading up to a thousand pages of redundant passive voice regurgitation. In those times, we can imagine such a moment. I write this as a pile of essays waits for me in the next room.
These feeling grow and their zenith (or nadir, depending on how one sees it) culminated in a g-chat I had last night with a friend who is currently hanging out in Chiapas. In the lead up to the part of the story he knew would drive me to the brink, he told me that Mexico is pretty much run by drug lords these days. The Zapatistas are a mere shell of what they once were. Subcomandante Marcos* applied for a job at SUNY Binghamton and WAS REJECTED. This story is telling in so many ways. Who knows if Marcos revealed his identity. I'm sure if he did, he would pack the lecture halls. My friend Hilton and I were imagining him trying to fashion his CV. In any case, Marcos can't get a job. Further, it's pretty clear that academia is where many radicals go when they retire from actually doing stuff (hence a lot of the post-68 post-structuralist writing). This is not always so and a gross generalization; my supervisor is pretty much superwoman and I can name other names. But Marcos's story fits the trend in the most radical and depressing way possible. I am a really lame Marcos. Who wants to be a really lame Marcos?
* For those who aren't familiar with Subcomandante Marcos, he is the spokesperson for the Zapatistas - one of the central groups that inspired the worldwide "anti-globalization" movement in the late 90s. Radical white kids flocked to Chiapas to understand how an autonomous, "anarchistic" community like them could be replicated. There is a lot of academic interest in them, as well as the MST (Brazilian Landless Workers Movement) and the Argentinian collectives that emerged after the collapse of their economy. But Marcos, he's the philosopher king of the global movement against neoliberalism.
