Incoherent thoughts

I reopened this blog thinking I could just pick up where I left off. Turns out, it is not so easy as that. In the first place, I'm so rusty from not reading and writing for so long that I cannot compose my thoughts in an orderly fashion. I have grown used to thinking so many things simultaneously. You get away with them if they're just swimming in your head - if you're gonna put them down, you risk being incoherent. And that is probably the biggest no-no of any discourse.

For another, I have changed. I do not know how, I do not know how much - simply that I am no longer the same person I was. The old me would just blunder through - now I do not even want to make an effort. I am awkward.

I wonder if anyone has read Lisa Jewell's A Friend of the Family (or something to that effect)? This book tells of a young man who, after dumping his fiancee, puts his life on hold for three years. He went to Australia, did backpacking and a few odd jobs to support his lifestyle, and then came home to London expecting to find everything exactly where he left them three years ago. Of course, many things happened in between, and he was unable to come to terms with how much things have changed.

A lot have happened lately. Too much, but not nearly enough.
And I am confused with everything.

My courses for one. I used to like my English and Linguistics paper and hate my teaching papers passionately. Now I simply don't feel too passionately about any of them. I trod to class, and I listen, and I come back home. When I have to, I do the assignments. And then that's that.

I think, with ENGL 330, I'm suffering from inferiority complex. Yes. Hmm. In order to get into a 300 level ENGL paper, you need 2 200 level ENGL papers. I only happen to have one - ENGL 244 (which I absolutely loved). Somehow, I managed to get the uni to allow me to skip a 200 level paper. Which may account for the times when I sit in the class understanding nothing.

Yes, I'm suffering with the paper - and I so hate to admit it.

Furthermore, coming back to the issue of inferiority complex, yes - the course deals with issues such as racism, patriarchy, slavery, immigration, etc etc. Yes, very complex ones. I think, there is no way to deny that the British Empire was very evil once upon a time. They come to other peoples' place and then impose themselves as masters of those poor peoples. Trouble is, nobody is willing to say that out loud. Achebe is bloody patriarchal, my classmates said, therefore we should forgive Conrad for his Imperial sympathies. What? Are you bloody shitting me? Because Okonkwo beats his wife, by extension Britain is allowed to get away with colonialism? What?

I know I'm mad at them for even suggesting so. I'm also mad at myself because I cannot come back with a convincing argument. I didn't know, when I joined the course, that it would leave me feeling impotent.

The thing is, ENGL has always been my saviour. When everything else looks bleak and unpromising, I still have this little baby to fall back on. I'm not so sure anymore.

Perhaps, the novelty of uni life has finally worn off?