Wednesday, October 24, 2007

a question

Professor Purple, emerging tentatively (words, where are you? why aren't you flowing out of the keyboard at breakneck pace?) from a somewhat prolonged writer's block, asks the following question:

Is it possible to be smart and happy at the same time?

Because lately, I feel as though I'm getting stupider by the minute. Now, you might ask how that's possible when I've just gotten myself a degree. Let me state right now that I attained it purely by jumping through proverbial hoops and paying thousands of dollars to be humiliated by 10-year-olds, and not through a whit of thinking.

I come home with songs about cows and "stomping land" in my head, all to good end, mind you - and I can't seem to form a complete sentence with a word with more than two syllables in it.

Don't get me wrong: how many people can sing songs with mostly cute (and occasionally infuriating - but that's what keeps things interesting) little children until 2:30 in the afternoon, call it a day and earn a decent living? Everything I hear about grad school tells me that seven years of academe would be untenable. I choose to have free time, I choose to be creative, I choose to provide (finally) for my own earthly needs. I choose, furthermore, to do work which is positive, which is additive, which in some small way improves a community, among people who want to do the same.

You'd have to give me a pretty damn good reason to leave my classroom full of instruments, brightly-colored posters, and giggly munchkins for a desk in a cubicle, anywhere, doing nearly anything, staring at a computer screen or talking on the phone.

But if it gave me a chance to think, to talk to smart people who will challenge me and - yes - teach me, well...

Oh, to sit around a table on a verdant campus discussing some purely theoretical or at best hopelessly idealistic interpretation of a text - but to be challenged, to talk only of ideas and not of things - to have the annotated conversations I hold so dear, quoting and referring to text -

Note to self: find out if anybody offers liberal arts extension courses...