Being a humanities major at a small private liberal arts college in beautiful Southern California and spending most of my time laying in grass and not doing my readings is actually a lot harder than people think. I have to go to class three times a week. And those classes are things like ‘Sex Drugs & Rock n Roll’ or ‘Feminist Interpretations of Baba Yaga’.
Here’s how I cope with the stress of making up bullshit all day:
Self-hypnosis to violently dissociate at any mention of “Foucault.”
Instead of spending 12 hours reading Discipline and Punish and only understanding that the guy in the panopticon tower is totally jacking off, I spent 12 hours training myself to literally stop my fucking heart from beating whenever I hear his name. I am legally dead. I am also maintaining a 3.94 GPA.
Office hours with the hat man.
Being an academic weapon means taking dozens of benadryl after class so I can go into my mind palace and have some 1 on 1 time with my academic guide, the Tall Gray Man With No Face. He tells me things in the Old Tongue, things about the dormant beast named Apocalypse and the Night of 10000000 Nightmares. Also he teaches Statistics at a community college, so he can totally tutor me for my Quantitative Reasoning requirement.
Gnawing on bath bombs in the corner of class.
When I get stressed, I motivate myself with a sweet treat. I especially like the new Lush ‘American Dream’ flavored bath bomb in the shape of a hot dog. Everyone thinks I just have a yummy snack representing the US of A! Until I start coughing and hacking and retching in between bites of absolutely scrumptious Epsom Salt and everyone’s looking at me but I can’t stop chewing and I take another bite and I take another bite and I take another bite and I take another –
Saying “this reminds me of the Epic of Gilgamesh” in every class because it’s the oldest literary work so it’s also the most important.
No, I don’t know anything about the Epic of Gilgamesh, but neither does anyone else. I could tell you it’s a seminal feminist text documenting the seed of patriarchy and thus providing the answers for its very undoing and you’d believe it, wouldn’t you. Just to piggyback off of that, it seems to appear to seem like it is an ontological critique of semiotics and sovereign power, a dialectic that reminds me of Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault, shit, fuck, shit —