Thought(s) of the Week #034
excuse me for being obsessed with the pursuit of knowledge
I spent the last week or so writing something comparing my mother’s house to the panopticon which is living in drafts somewhere because the piece itself will spark the in-house conversation that I was writing about. Why poke the bear while telling it I don’t like being mauled.
In his own newsletter, my friend wrote about how he is glad to have exited the school system. He did this while talking about the Jack Black movie School of Rock and used the song that one of the child characters wrote about being disillusioned by school.
Baby we was making straight A's
But we was stuck in a dumb daze
Don't take much to memorize your lies
I feel like I've been a hypnotized
Like anything my friends do or say or write, this has been sitting with me for a while. I started singing the song to myself today and almost immediately my brain switched to a song from Phineas and Ferb.
The one brown boy in Phineas and Ferb’s group of friends is an Indian kid named Baljeet who is book-smart and nerdy. We see him at summer science fairs, beating himself up over a potential A- on a blueprint for a portal to Mars, dressing up as failed math test for a haunted house, and making every possible reference to his intelligence and its validation. Anything less than an A+ would make him a failure. One of the many summer courses Baljeet takes is called “Summer Rocks,” a rock music course he signed up for by mistake, thinking it was geology. His final project is a musical performance, which is his convinced he will fail to the point he disturbs the neighborhood with his yelling, which he calls the “fail wail.” When asked what he does to express his feelings, says “I do a lot of math, the feelings come and go.” He’s not in touch with any feelings beside the need to succeed and the crippling fear of failure. Come performance time, the camp counselor/teacher (a teenager named Coltrane) tells Baljeet that there no grades. Baljeet, whose feeling are closely tied to academic validation, gets on stage and sings the following:
I’ve been burned by vague lesson plans and a free-floating curriculum
I like my rules, baby, etched in stone
cuz you know I am going to stick to them
Can I get a syllabus? A little discipline?
judge me on a scale from A to F
Somebody give me grade
I need the man keeping me down
somebody give me a grade
is there a red pen in this town
somebody give me a grade
I already said it, i need that extra credit today
give me grade
and make it an A
I remember watching this episode as a kid and feeling incredibly validated by the sentiment of needing the structure of school. I graduated four months ago and kind of feel like I’m in free-fall. For most of my life, I organized time in grading periods. For last three years, Fall started mid-August, Spring started in January, and I needed a new academic planner before Labor Day. But I didn’t buy a new planner this year. And my part-time job didn’t end in July.
On one hand, I feel good about not being in school. My last year of college was rough, and I am taking a much needed break from the conditions that led to never having clean hair or plates. But I loved college. I love a syllabus and a guided discussion about the social and political implications of a movie I hadn’t heard of until just then. I loved talking to my professors (when I wasn’t avoiding them) and on a good day I lived for a term paper. Above all, I like to learn, and I apparently need to create some guidelines around that.
So I’ve made myself a bit of a course list. Four things to which devote around 4-6 hours a week. I’m not going to tell you what they are or to watch extent this all goes, but saying it, writing it down, that’s accountability enough for today. When I get deeper into it all, I plan to share some knowledge synthesis. Mini term papers, if you will. For now, here are this week’s
tv: The Runarounds (one thing Jonas Pate (ep of Outer Banks) is gonna do is make a summer show about teenagers following their dreams, and I’ll watch.), Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Riverdale (I count this show as part of my personal curriculum. I have so many thoughts and feelings about teen shows generally, many of which distill into a defense of the alien-invasion-time-travel-superpowers-serial-killer-gene-diagetic-musicals nonsense that is this show)
movies: Friendship (2024), Love Brooklyn (2025), The Roses (2025), Niege (1981), The Left-Handed Woman (1977) (most of my money goes to movie theaters and coffee shops)
attempt at aliveness: writing morning pages, even if I’m not actually reading or using The Artist’s Way
refrain: “Maybe she’ll something special”- Pink Sky, Infinity Song