umm.

This is gonna call for skill.

Skills I don't have. Liiiiiike. Like I am so superbly... Like I am going to show up to my professor's office hours tomorrow and tell her "Wow gosh golly I don't care about .... well not I don't caaaaare, but I really really don't have an interest in studying slavery."

Oh wait no not slavery but I have no interest in to "investigate enslavement int he United States from the enslaved person's perspective...examine the events of Reconstruction...explore scholarship on Reconstruction in the United States with a particular emphasis on the experiences of formerly enslaved persons...assess the relationship between a conception of slavery on one hand, and an expectation of Reconstruction on the other."

That's taken from the syllabus. Also on the syllabus are now my bored scribbles, drawing random shapes on papers being apparently one weird ass thing that both I and my dad do...hmm. Anyway.

I was told all summer long that senior seminars were basically that you kinda do your own thing and turn in a research paper at the end of the quarter. Since it's only 10 week quarter, we're not expected much, just to do it, basically. Specifically took it in the fall so that I could have all summer to do my own study and not show up for the first class breathing through my mouth.

And I did, maaaaaan. I got books from the library, I bought books, I read them, I like, like, I thought. 'bout stuff. No, I did not finish Holt's tome, didn't even get a quarter of the way through, but you probably haven't either.

If there was another week in the summer break I'd have tried again to understand this as the first time was...just not happening, after getting into Rothbard's Panic of 1819, and getting suspicious of Remini's assurances that the Bank...

Oh wait, but these have about as much to do about slavery as the price of tea in China.

And the reading list has ....aaaargh it was soo annoying sitting there and "oh yeah we're going to be reading from the perspectives something something former slaves."

oh. Okay, cool...Frederick Douglass is totally down for his...he's got cred. Booker T was only a little kid by the time he was freed, but still got cred..oh wait. Booker T isn't on the reading list. oh but that's okay!

Because W.E.B. duBois is. Okay, booker t no, booker t, the assimilationist in the *rolls eyes* black assimilationist-nationalist spectrum, this guy, he we don't read, the former slave. But duBois, the never was a slave, mixed, well-raised, college professor who didn't even live in the South, not even on the nationalist end of things far as I understood as he was just simply opposed to booker t...yes. Yes, he we read.

Couple other books, one by a guy in a black regiment (did not bother asking which side), and one by a chick who was...a nurse or some such in the same regiment. Totally cool, man.

I'm not reading this. hoooooooooooooooooooooooo no. I did not sign up for an introductory sociology class.

So far, I have no reason to think that I'll get to do my paper on anything remotely close to what I want to do--there's no way I can just jump into Reconstruction not even being familiar with the Polk administration, this isn't the Protestant Reformation here...and "19th century US" (the only limits we knew of when we signed up for the course; me also since it turned out from reading her syllabus that she does not at all check the email listed on the campus website for her...'cause I never got an email back.) seminar is only offered this one quarter this one last freakin year I want to be here...so. So so so. After I talk to her, well no her office hours are late in the day so before that I'll find out who else is teaching seminars either this next quarter or the spring quarter...the only one that seems maybe remotely that I can do or want to would be 20th century US, which is right now this quarter, just Thursdays.

But...but...*whiiiiiiine* ugh. Who cares about the 20th century? Too many people, that's who. Gah, what? Goldwater? oooooh yeah get some literature up on dat shizzle.