Where the hell did the last couple of weeks go?

Oh, right — deadlines. Two new preps. All classes over-enrolled. Teaching in a stupidly labor-intensive way that doesn’t work when students don’t do the reading. I have a couple of interesting (I hope) posts brewing in the back of my brain. One is about what can happen when we remember that yes, every campus has its deadwood, its extra-special snowflakes, its mean girls who never got past the real (or imagined) slights of being the victims of mean girls in middle school … BUT, we don’t have to let those people set the norms for anyone else’s behaviour. These things are tied in my mind to the current US election cycle, and the lack of anything resembling honest and civil conversation, or concern for the common good. And somehow, my brain keeps trying to encapsulate my reactions and express them via the words of Joss Whedon. So in lieu of a well-composed essay that I don’t have time to write because I have a sabbatical application due, a deadline to meet for a publisher. and a pile for reading and grading getting higher by the minute, I give you the last couple of weeks (sort of in order) in cut-and-pasted Whedonian:

“It’s just that in High School, knowledge was pretty much frowned upon, you really had to work to learn anything. But here… the energy, the collective intelligence, it’s like this force. This penetrating force.. and I can just feel my mind opening up, you know, and letting this place just thrust into and spurt knowledge into…  That sentence ended up in a different place than it started out in.”

“To read makes our speaking English good.”   

“I love fantasy. I love horror. I love musicals. Whatever doesn’t really happen in life is what I’m interested in. As a way of commenting on everything that does happen in life, because ultimately the only thing I’m really interested in is people.”

“You either have to write or you shouldn’t be writing. That’s all.”  

“Write it. Shoot it. Publish it. Crochet it, sauté it, whatever. MAKE.”   

“It was only when I got to college that I realized that the rest of the world didn’t run the way my world was run, and that there was a need for feminism. I’d thought it was all solved. There are people like my mom, clearly everyone is equal and it’s all fine. Then I get into the world and I hear the things people are saying. Then I get to Hollywood and hear the very casual, almost insidious misogyny that just runs through so much of the fiction. It was just staggering to me.”   

“Nothing worse than a monster who thinks he’s right with God.”

 “The thing about changing the world… Once you do it, the world’s all different.”   

“It is the most fun I’m ever going to have. I love to write. I love it. I mean, there’s nothing in the world I like better…”

“You are talking crazy-person talk. Put your words in word places please.”  

“Sir, I think you have a problem with your brain being missing.”

“We have done the impossible. And that makes us mighty.”   

“I really like beer.”   

“There are certain human truths, like death, that nobody gets to escape, and pain, which everybody not only feels but needs. You have to go through it. So for everybody, at some point—very often for teenagers—the world is a terrible place. The world is a giant, awful black hole of evil conspiracy. Sometimes that’s because you have perspective on what the world’s really like, and sometimes it’s because you’ve completely lost perspective and you’re having a terrible day. But no matter what, everybody shares that feeling, and life is kind of about your ways around that, your ways around certain truths.”   

“Recognizing power in another does not diminish your own.”  

“Oh my god, are you twelve?”

“Your logic does not resemble our Earth logic.”

“Curse your sudden yet inevitable betrayal!

“Yep. That went well.”

 “I cannot abide useless people.”   

“Well, my time of not taking you seriously is coming to a middle.”

“The mission is what matters” 

“If you can’t do something smart, do something right.”           

  “Very occasionally, if you pay really close attention, life doesn’t suck.”