I had to pick my brother up from his basketball practice because my dad was out late doing God knows what. (Luke said that Dad was doing some interviewing, which I know is a bullshit excuse, so I assume that either my brother was lying to me, or that my dad just lied to my brother. I'm not sure which possibility I find more distasteful. I also suspect that my dad was out and about with the girlfriend that he continually denies seeing, but come the fuck on-- I'm not an idiot.) So I took Luke to McDonald's because it was dinner time and I felt compelled to feed the poor child and then we went back to my apartment where we watched tv and did his English homework together. It's so bizarre because he's taller than me now and he has a man voice. Freaks me out. Regardless, along with voicing some pro-Bush sentiments (which further cemented my belief that I am the black sheep in my family, and that being such is not a bad thing) he divulged the fact that my father has said that my apartment smells. What the fuck? Since I have moved in, my dad has been in my apartment twice; therefore, I feel he has little to no ground upon which to accurately judge the state of my living. Furthermore, I go to great pains to make sure that my apartment does not smell, because I realize that housing two animals in such a limited space, particularly one that shits in a box and another that tends to just drop it right on the fucking floor, leaves a great potential for stink. But I freshen the fucking carpets with that powder shit and I clean up the messes with Resolve and Febreeze and I burn incense when I know that people will be coming over. And I feel like all of these efforts should result in a not-too-bad smelling apartment. But if not, will somebody please just fucking tell me. Kyle, Megan, Ruby . . . someone. I can't bear the thought of unknowingly living in a rancid-smelling shithole.

On another crappy note, our 211 professor lost both Ruby's and my papers. Lovely, right? So now I feel like he's looking at us with a distrustful eye, as if we really didn't turn the bastards in, and the amount of anxiety about receiving a grade has been extended. I'm kind of pissed about the whole thing. And very fucking glad that I am not so stupid as to not save things.

And speaking of stupid, we had to write proposals for my philosophy class today, which we then presented to small groups for criticism/suggestions for improvement on our theses. Exciting, right? Oh yeah. Of course, the hardest part in all of this was coming up with a fucking idea, and I felt like what I came up with was all right--not great, but all right. But we have a couple of bastards in our class that conduct themselves as if they are God's gift to philosophy and as if our professor should be fucking grateful to have them in her class.

On a side note: Our professor corrected someone in the class for saying they did good, rather than well. Which immediately made me think, "Women who care about grammar are hot." I don't know what it is about her, but she has become the faculty obsession that was bound to occur in my academic career at some point or another. And it makes absolutely no sense to me, and anyone who knows me would probably never predict that she would be the center of my professor fantasies. But I would totally go down on her, simply as a symbol of my endearance towards her. Shit. That's making me look like a weirdo, isn't it? Whatever.

Back to the proposals . . . So I was really afraid to end up in a group with one or more of these pompous dicks because I expected that within such a group two things would happen: 1) Their proposals would attain a level of insight that would make mine seem incredibly inaccurate and 2) They would subsequently rip mine apart in that cunning, subtly condescending way. Of course, I end up in a group with the bastards of the bastards and . . . their proposals were shit. SHIT. Absolute shit! The one idiot who continually asks questions so as to appear critical, engaged and intelligent (I guess) not only focused on something incredibly insignificant without bothering to try and establish a significance, but it made no sense at all because he kept deviating from his thesis so that it appeared he was simultaneously supporting opposing arguments. The second guy who is one of those that tries to woo with his "intellect" didn't even have a fucking thesis. And as far as insight goes-- not so much. Not so much at all. Both of their theses were just "I agree/disagree" statements that lacked any sort of because to argue. What the hell? And the first guy made painful, painful grammatical errors and neither of them formerly cited the related sources that we were supposed to find. So after reading both of their proposals and sort of laughing to myself about how crappy they were, we had to discuss our criticims/suggestions of each other's work. This was the point when my second assumption was realized. My comments of "Um, you didn't really have a clear thesis statement" and "I didn't understand which side of the issue you were trying to argue" were downplayed, if not ignored, and we instead spent 15 minutes talking about how my idea was "like, floating" (don't ask, I don't know what the hell he meant) and that the argument was clear and made sense, but didn't intuitively flow. To which I simply pose one big, fat question mark. How the hell am I supposed to give that any sort of consideration.

The point of most of that was to get out the angry, not nice criticism that I had to repress in class. The bigger point is that this whole situation made me realize a couple of things. First of all, I knew that both of those guys were full of shit, so it doesn't make sense that I would expect them to be full of substance and meaning. And when I sit through class after class thinking about how stupid their fucking questions are and how much I wish they would just shut the fuck up, it makes no sense that I would be intimidated by them. I think I have a tendency to be intimidated by confidence. No, not confidence, but vanity, cockiness, narcissism, i'm-the-shitness, whatever you want to call it. But why should I let someone's mask for their inadequecy freak me out? Secondly, I realized that I am way too fucking hard on myself. I assume that everyone is capable of far more than I am and I always worry that I'm just going to end up as a worthless failure, but I'm really doing a pretty damn good job. The question is whether being so hard on myself is going to lead to my self-destruction, or if it is the driving force in my life. I'm going to operate under the assumption that the latter is true, because I think that if I stopped being hard on myself, I would melt into some sort of mediocre, easily-digestible, optimistic stock character. But I, frankly, want to be the goddamn Overman, and that takes a lot of fucking drive.

This sounded totally conceited didn't it? Fuck.

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