a++ would smuggle into space again

I just emailed in a paper that I hate more than any other paper I've turned in. This is not because it's rhetoric-heavy and done in a rush -- I have done papers under worse conditions, and for reasons less solid than "grief combined with actual responsibilities" -- but because the book I'm writing on is historically bankrupt. It's by Richard Pipes, and it's called The Degaev Affair. It's extremely well-written, it makes an interesting point about the origins of terrorism, and every fucking word of it is source hash.

( ONE HOUR OF SLEEP RAGE )

One of the things I hate most about Human Being & Citizen class is this trimester's teacher's incredible gift for analogies that display the idiocy of what Kant is saying--

TEACHER: Kant says that the intelligible world and the sensible world both apply at the same time, but one is more true. For example, we perceive that we are standing still, but we are traveling around the earth [eta: sun, wtf self] at an incredible speed.
EMMA: ... theory of relativity...

--or what the teacher is saying--

TEACHER: So what gives the Declaration of Independence its legitimacy? If Joseph walked into this room and declared "I am a woman", would that make him a woman? No, of course not.
EMMA: Trans women -- gender identity -- *asphyxiates*

--and it all drives me up the wall. I know so many of my posts lately have been pissy, for which I do sincerely and whole-heartedly apologize, but some days I feel like being in class is being asked one long endless stream of "have you stopped beating your wife?" style questions. Like, if I say that it's possible that the sensible world is as important as the intelligible world, I'm already accepting Kant's lolariously ridiculous dichotomy. The world doesn't divide neatly into empirical and rational but I spent like twenty minutes today trying to defend the possibility of living an empirical life, sounding progressively crazier as I went.

GIRL ACROSS THE ROOM: Yes, but I don't understand how you can work off of experience and not off of reason. That would deprive us of our sense of self!
EMMA: Yes, but the self is a lie constructed by our brains.
GIRL ACROSS THE ROOM: I'm sorry, what?
EMMA: It's all a lie! A conspiracy of neurons! And our society has no legitimacy and free will is a fraud! You're being lied to! You're being --

Which is when the men in dark shades came to take me away for reprocessing into a rational being, obviously, so the rest of this post is classified.

The Discussion We Had: "I feel that Hamlet may be angry at himself when he calls himself a 'rogue and peasant slave', and he may be a little dramatic and dislike himself, but I'm not sure, and ... I think it's possible he wants to catch his uncle out by the use of the play, and ... yeah. Let's go over the plot again!"

Repeat for an hour.

The only interesting thing said was the relation of a play within a play to the themes of the play, but we didn't pursue it at all. We just finished up with a bullshit discussion of the Pyrrhus and Priam text, in which our teacher proved that a) she can't pronounce Pyrrhus and b) she doesn't know what the fuck is going on in the play, which at least explains why she keeps summarising it.

Yay, Shakespeare class! *kicks the teacher with hobnailed boots*

(A brief interlude:)

EMMA: Hey, Meli--Mêlé--TECH GIRL MEL. How are you?
TECH GIRL MEL (WHO IS NOT MELIGOT, DAMMIT): I'm fine. Et vous?
EMMA: Rocking. Do you have my computer, by any chance?
MEL: Yeah, we fixed the monitor, just replaced the screen. Here you go!
EMMA: Is the disc drive working?
MEL: ... the what?
EMMA: *facepalm* Tell me I told you about that.
MEL: ... no? We'll have to send it in.
EMMA: But I just got it back from having it sent in and they managed to fix a broken disc drive with just a shitty disc drive.
MEL: Sorry?
EMMA: ARGH.

(Exit, with pain.)

Not...actually a post about today, mostly. Today my school was out, actually. Very fun.

But, um, Wednesday was much more interesting. We're reading, as has been previously referred to, MAUS in English class right now. Many stupid people in English class, and many...interesting ones.

Some episodes:

( In Which Nextian's English Class Is Of Itself Overanalyzed. )