osidflksdhfslkhg!!!!!

I've been staring at this stupid computer screen for hours. Desperation, sheer desperation, is all I feel. I'm trying to write an impossible paper. Impossible, I tell you. Every now and then, I am forced to get up and walk about the room for a minute, stand at the open window. I think those tweeting birds (and increasingly, crickets) reassuring me that there is a world outside are the only things keeping me alive right now.

I'm overwhelmed with philosophies. I'm trying to apply them to this darn book, a book of journals written by a guy in the desert. He was just writing them for many of the same reasons I'm writing right now-- he needed to get his thoughts out because his head was stuffed with them. Yet, somewhere along the lines, they got edited, polished, and published and now I'm sitting here trying to analyze the living bejesus out of them.

I don't think he intended any socio-political undertones nor were all these deeply profound and vastly hidden "allusions" to the "forefathers" of poetry intended. The things we grow up reading come out in our thoughts and writings. That is all. That is why you find shades of Jeffers and Thoreau in his works, Mr. Literary-Database-Contributor. Not because he wanted you to create a 60-page, printer-killing PDF file about it! You go on and on about how he was slying avoiding citation--perhaps they weren't conscious decisions! Perhaps he was simply scribbling in his little housetrailer with his gopher snakes and didn't intend for generations and generations to read this book and scratch their heads and apply the tenants of humanism to his very syllable!

This is all making me feel quite dumb, and perhaps that's why angry paragraphs such as the one above come about. I do not have a Ph.D. in English or comparative literature. I don't even have my high school diploma yet. Why am I being asked to grapple with the great mysteries of the universe? Why should I have to apply philosophical ponderings to the desert? I've never seen Utah; I never met Edward Abbey; I've never killed a rabbit with a stone. How am I supposed grasp the knowledge a Ph.D in philosophy may not possess and apply meaning to those things??

I should not feel dumb. I have been thrown into the deep end of the pool without my water wings and nobody ever gave me any swim lessons. How are you supposed to tread water without arms?? I am forced to sit here and stew in frustration and stare at these pretentious, pointless articles and passages I've read 10,000 times, and bullet points about existentialism that I'm not even allowed to cite and wonder how on earth I'm going to do this for the next two (probably, possibly more) years??

It's enough to drive an English major to communications.

End of rant. I have to go stare at Jeffers some more. URGH.

*random note that made me smile for the first time in hours: when I went to type one of the tags for this post as "hate" it corrected it to "happiness." Thank you, blogger interface, for trying to cheer me up. I wish it'd autocorrect a five-page research paper on the philosophies presented in Desert Solitaire!