Bad Assignments

There are certain days, which tend to be more concentrated in winter quarter, where I simply cannot work. Often these days are incited by some particularly egregious assignment.

In this case, it is an assignment for my Ulysses class: to search on JSTOR for papers on Ulysses from the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, and 00’s and analyze how the critical approach to Ulysses has changed over the decades. I like Joyce. I like Ulysses. As an Econ major, I even like JSTOR. I hate English literary criticism.

So, the obvious solution to a sucky assignment: don’t do it for a very long time. I mean, I could collapse while making hot cocoa with Bailey’s, or I could be electrocuted plugging in my computer to watch videos on YouTube. And if that happens, I will be happy I didn’t spend my last moments looking for critical perspectives of motherhood in Ulysses from the 60’s, 70’s, and today.

The other reason I didn’t want to work was I talked to my parents. I found out about this program Columbia College has in Prague in the summers, and I’m trying to find a way to pay for it and justify the cost. I’m thinking it might make more sense to just take that money and wander in Europe for twice as long, just observing and writing.

Maybe my dad and I and one of his relatives who speaks fluent Hungarian will go to Hungary to the village where my grandfather that I never met grew up before he came here. In any case, my mom said in passing that I was “floundering” and it would help for me to take a personality test.

Now, I hate it when I am condemned by a single word. It is quite possible that my mother did not mean “floundering”, precisely. And she had the idea because my dad found a personality test helpful in his college days. But, the word makes me worry that I am, in fact floundering.

It’s been hard for me to get to a point where I really am thinking about wandering. Even now, I have to push myself to do it, to explore. And I need to know that floundering is not the same as wandering, that not having a plan for success is not the same as failing.

But maybe I should just accept the floundering moniker. Maybe what I really need to do is accept failure itself, complete and utter failure, so I can be happy with any kind of success. Maybe I need to listen to my mother