Damaged Goods

Education is the only good for which people will pay top dollar and refuse delivery.

My economics professor threw in this aside to a lecture on whoknowswhat last month, and it has stuck with me more than any other topic from that class. I guess I just illustrated his point.

I know people can get stressed out by minimal things, but hearing that there are students in our school blowing rails in the parking garage before class because they just can't handle the socratic method makes me chuckle. School isn't hard, and class is definitely not hard. This holds especially true for a department that requires teachers to curve grades up to an absurd degree. People spend far too much time confusing hard with time consuming and misallocate their stress; I just wish it weren't so contagious. I'd much prefer to reserve my stress levels for things like traffic, bad grammar and the obnoxiously high price of Morningstar Farms products, not largely intuitive Marketing assignments or -- even worse -- coordinating various school spirit-related activites. Please.

I'm quite amazed by how much the 30-40 hours a week I spend on campus right now exceeds the three hours a week I spent on campus in my final semester at Virginia Tech (by 27 to 37 hours?). I'd skip entire weeks of class in undergrad. Actually, my perceived work ethic is probably still in the bottom 10% because the business school is rife with ass-kissers and overachievers, so I guess nothing's really changed. In fact, you can see from the picture to the right that one such overachiever arranged for our entire class to wear the same shirt to our first exam, and you can further notice that I clearly (excuse the upcoming cliché) didn't give a shit.

Eighteen months from now, we'll all get the same 8.5"x11" sheet of paper with the USC president's signature on it. The only difference is that I plan to accomplish this without cannibalizing my normal daily life of nothing in particular.

Maybe I should just write a manifesto for marginally motivated pseudo-academics. People love books justifying their less than perfect existence.