Inspired by Dead Poets’ Society

Today I spent almost the entire day working my tail off on homework. Considering I spent most of last night doing the same thing, it gets to be rather exhausting. But I got a lot done, so that’s good. You know the one thing I hate about being a writing major? Writing crappy papers. Since I’m a writing major there’s this feeling that everything I write has to make people stop and go, “wow.” But sometimes you have these papers that you could care less about and you just have to crank them out. I was doing that yesterday. Now it’s not like they’re bad papers. By normal standards they’re decent. I’ll probably end up getting an A on them. But if these were for a writing class, I think I’d go crawl in a hole. I suppose you have to get the bad writing out of your system somewhere. And you can’t poor your heart and soul into every little report about the impacts on the graphic design field by the legendary Paul Rand. I think you’d burn out pretty quickly if you did. Oh well, that just bothers me.


Tonight some friends and I watched Dead Poets’ Society. Excellent movie. Yet another Robin Williams movie with the encouraging theme of “carpe diem: seize the day!” It’s interesting how many films he’s in that are like that.

It’s movies like this that I love so much because they bring my focus back to what life is all about. What is life worth living for? Is it just to get your homework done and squeak by with whatever you can? To whimper through life? Or to cry out with a barbaric yalp and suck the marrow out of life? I’ll go for the sucking, thank you.

It also renews an interest in poetry. I’ve always hated poetry. I’ve always feared poetry. I’m thinking now that I should take a poetry class just because I’m so afraid of it. Last semester I had a professor who was much like Keating in Dead Poets Society. He brought life to every piece of literature we looked at. I don’t think it was until after the semester was over that I realized just how cool some of the literature legends are. I always read their stuff and thought it was so out there and so bizarre. It didn’t make sense. They were just streaming together all these images in high-fullutin language. But somehow my prof always unlocked it all, and everything made sense. I think I’m slowly waking up to that kind of stuff. A few weeks ago I found myself digging out my literature book and reading some Henry David Thoreau. Good stuff. I don’t know why it didn’t hit me the first time I read it.

Sometimes poetry doesn’t need words to speak. The poetry of a touch, of a gentle gaze, or a tender kiss can mean so much, all with out even whispering a word.

Yalp!

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