über-nerdus

The weather was painfully good today. It really was. I think it may have even hit 70. I think I'm lacking inspiration today. It's the weather; I hate it, I really do. There is something about this absolutely perfect weather that is utterly demoralizing. I didn't get to work today until 2:30. Then, I had trouble writing my rough draft of this research paper on cold fusion by electrolysis of water. It's more of an exposition on the whole fiasco really. We have to have a draft of the 1st 4 pages by tomorrow, so I sat down and I started pounding out some junky background on "hot" nuclear fusion, how it applies to the controversy of "cold" nuclear fusion, and some information on the Coulomb barrier. It was one of those times when you write and then stop to think, and you look at the clock and you realize you've been staring at the computer screen doing absolutely nothing for 15 minutes. It's like you go into a quasi-coma. I then I broke from my trance and had this horribly depressive realization: I'm writing a research paper on electrochemically induced cold fusion for english... ENGLISH. Why? What sort of moron am I?? For god's sake, if my teacher even takes the time to actually think about cold fusion, it's not like he's actually going to think it's interesting. He teaches ENGLISH. Hah! One time at speech and debate practice Dan and Catherine were showing me how to take the integral of this equation, and the ENGLISH teacher whose classroom it's held in started yelling at us for writing math on his chalkboard--I mean dry-erase board. They replaced about 60% of the chalkboards in the school with dry-erase boards about 3 years ago. I guess they stopped because they ran out of money for doing it. But it was the stupidest thing in the world. You want to know how much a stick of chalk costs? Probably about $0.10. You want to know how much a dry erase pen costs? About $1.50. And my math teacher goes through more than 1 a week. Somehow I don't think she would go through 15 sticks of chalk in a week. So essentially they spent money so they could force the teachers to spend more money (NO! The school does not pay for pens, chalk, or anything else like that). I guess they did it because the dust of the chalk is some kind of allergen or carcinagin or toxic cloud, or really I have no idea, but I'm guessing that they were sued, or someone sued someone somewhere, so everyone started replacing chalkboards with dry-erase boards. But back to my paper. So, I've realized that I've set myself up for failure because my teacher can't possibly relate to the topic, unless I sensationalize the heck out of it... Which is interesting. Before about 6 months ago, I was a perpetrator of this rampant senationalism in my serious writing (this blog doesn't count). Now I hate it con pasión. I can't stand journalism, and I write everything as factually and as emotionally detached as possible. So just imagine this paper. A factual, emotionally detached, devoid of figurative language, paper of sorts. It's doomed for failure. That's another thing I can't stand in anything but fiction: FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE. They try to teach you in school that it adds to the meaning of things. They're WRONG. The absolute only thing that it is good for is developing theme, character (only if it develops theme by doing so), or mood (and usually only if it develops theme by doing so) in fiction. That's because the only thing that makes fiction good is theme, if fiction had no themes, it would have no purpose and therefore I would have to say that it could not exists. But then again, there's a lot of pointless things that exist. But back to my original point. When you start putting metaphors in nonfiction, you start opening things up to interperatation and this can lead to multiple meanings for the same fact. It's terrible business, really. Facts are facts and all efforts should be kept to keep them that way. Then there's people that say that figurative language is necessary because it makes things INTERESTING. That's stupid too! If you write something, you shouldn't have to intentionally create ambiguity by using figurative language in order to keep someone's attention. If their attention can't be kept by the facts, the very substance of what is written, then they shouldn't be reading the thing in the first place, or they shouldn't complain. I mean, the level of laziness here is outrageous. People having to require nonfactual distortionary cues to periodically pique their interest in what they're reading... Unbelievable. And to think that I bought into it for all these years is even more disturbing. So the point here is fourfold. Fold the first: don't weight fact, reason, and truth with unnecessary aesthetic baggage. Fold the second: aesthetics must always have a definite purpose, because things without purposes should not exist. Fold the third: good weather is always indicative of irony. And fold the fourth: there is no way that I can write anything without finding some inner contradiction and hypocrisy. And I guess there's also a fifth fold: all writing is hypocritical and contradictory and the only reason it's considered and intellectual process is because sorting through the endless contradictions requires the useless firing of so many random neurons, that the brain is built up for more productive things like math and science.