[Sethomas]

It's hard for me to tell if the parts intended to be funny (read: two sentences, basically) are funny at all since I don't know the basis of comparison for this type of humor. (McSweeney's, which I love, is a notable mention.) But if it is, once upon a time I-Mockery would have been a good audience. Not so much anymore, but I'll post it anyways. Don't blame me if you read it with that warning and hate yourself afterwards.

This is mostly about how I cope with the fact that I'm working two jobs, one menial and one ludicrously menial, during my struggle to get back to the ivory tower where I can talk about how fleeting joy in material goods is while I starve to death.

(Yes, it IS shtick for me to take my proficiency for pretension and express it in a far more exaggerated form than I do in real life. I work in a goddamn Goodwill for fuck's sake.)
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As a college neophyte, I had to frequently read academic journals for all kinds of things. It always struck me as hilarious that for them to have come to us as required reading they must have been written by PhD bigwigs yet most of them could have been written by pretty much anyone (perhaps needing to be touched up for loquacity by a freshman English major) and eventually come out essentially the same. Some of them mask this by including a wide array of vague allusions assuming the reader will know their source, but the common jack could compensate by inventing such allusions fictitiously. This would work because the reader would be too embarrassed to admit not knowing the source. When I would read the author’s credentials as something like “AB Darmouth, 1998; ThD Harvard, 2004” I’d draw the observation that to even have got to the point to have the chance to earn those credentials, she’d have been capable of writing most of that paper by the time she was a junior in high school.

Admittedly, this only works well with the humanities. Biology journals, for instance, are generally intelligible to anyone but have frequent unfamiliar jargon and they do require a good background in the subject to actually make sense of the expressed ideas. Physics journals, on the contrary, typically require at least a master’s degree to make any sense whatsoever and Microsoft Word would put red squiggles under around 20% of all the words used in it (where words are actually used).

So, my friends and I would always make fun of this. We’d throw out ideas for totally idiotic papers to write that would actually get published in all likelihood if we had the prerequisite degrees or degree candidacy. My friend, who was an economics and poli sci major, screened the movie Mars Attacks! just to demonstrate the efficacy of his idea to write a thesis about how it relates to the classical tragedy genre. His idea was that he would apply it to getting an MA in both film studies and literature, neither of which he actually wanted/needed.


Ever meet a film studies major? For pursuing a degree that teaches absolutely nothing except how to lose the ability to tell the difference between flashing an erect penis on the screen as purported art and the suggestion of doing so as flagrant satire*, they manage to take pretension to whole new planes of existence.



As the papers I read got dumber and more masturbatory, or at least my awareness of this tendency solidified ever more thoroughly, I started to amuse myself by narrating all my thoughts as if they were to be published in a journal. No matter how stupid the result, I was always amused both by the process itself and the plausibility that someone had already written such a paper. I encouraged myself to do this because, for all the nihilism it induces, I hope to actually need this skill someday.

Sometimes an amusing (to me, at least) mental image would pop up and I’d narrate mentally a long and boring academic buildup to it. This is pretty similar to what Mark Twain would do in his essays on science and society. An example of mine, imagined in a literary criticism journal:

(…)There does exist the popular notion that discussion of subtext is too contrived. No matter how deep into a text the deconstructivist might dive, it is presumed, pearls could only be found so deep as the author had deliberately cultivated them. This errs from extension of the idea that highly-organized linguistic systems derive their utility solely from the virtue of explicit rather than implicit report in non-ironic exchanges of communication. This fails upon inspection as subtext is clearly ubiquitous within normal quotidian dialog. Consider the fact that a stated desire to issue an expressed reminder of common knowledge is quite regularly, if not predominantly, made in allusion or reaction to an ad hoc concern. This is observed in passive aggression, as a reminder such as “I am not the only person who lives here capable of doing dishes” by no means introduces the recipient of such a reminder to knowledge thenceto unknown.

“Apropos à quoi?” is the ruling dictum in issuing a reminder and its subsequent interpretation relies on the presumably a priori ability for the audience to answer. The inextricable link between a reminder’s utility and its referential subtext is easily underscored by scenarios wherein a reminder is issued sans clear predication. It is not remarkable that statements made ex nihilo—however factual—may incur bewilderment. However, while the insertion of trivia about medieval French dynasties into a classroom lecture about calculus may certainly distract and perhaps aggravate the student, it would certainly not raise the consternation experienced by a grocery shopper who hears via the store PA a “reminder” that patrons are not rewarded discounts for defecating upon the fresh produce displays.

Another thing I do is contrive a stupid idea into personal narrative, even if it doesn’t accurately describe me, in the same format. Like:

Having grown up with an abusive father, I have long borne the concern that I had a predisposition towards abusing my significant other and possibly my own children. Without a significantly long relationship in my personal history, I had no means by which to gauge this terrifying possibility. I was mortified, then, upon the realization that my fears were affirmed by the relationship I hold with my dick vis-à-vis my frequent tendency to beat it.

You can really do this with any of the SNL “Deep Thoughts”, probably.

I think I’ll go hit the bar for last call now.

*Cf. Ingmar Bergman's "Persona" and Monty Python's "The Meaning of Life", (and probably others).