Neat alternative to reading this column: Interact with the text. Use scissors to clip out the words and arrange and re-arrange them in an attempt to find an underlying pattern or deeper significance, a la John Nash in A Beautiful Mind. Or, use the clipped words as confetti and pretend you're at a weird, nerdy literary party. Or just rent A Beautiful Mind. It did win an Oscar after all, which is more than you can say for anything written in the SL, the fact that they are completely different genres notwithstanding.
Right off the bat, I should say that I'm way too tired to be writing this article, let alone try to make it funny. Let alone interesting. Let alone go down to south campus and solicit witty quotes from hot freshmen.
Why am I so tired? Because I have been staying up late every night to do my work. I have a hell of a lot of work. Probably more work than you. I'm so tired that I could fall asleep any second. In fact, every time your attention is diverted, I'm taking half-second catnaps, quickly so you won't notice. That's how tired I am.
I'm very busy. Definitely busier than you are, which makes me more important. Do you want to see how busy I am? I'll show you my planner. I'm using a planner now because my PalmPilot was so overloaded it blew a fuse and started a small fire in my dorm room. Just let me take off my heavy backpack first, which is filled with several organic chemistry textbooks as well as large novels written in other languages, all of which I have to read by tomorrow, and I'll show you my planner. There, see if you can find a free hour anywhere this week. If you can, it's because I've been to busy doing things to write down all the other things I have to be doing. Like I said, I'm very busy. And thus very important.
All this work puts me under a lot of stress. If you look closely you'll notice that my right eyelid has been twitching during this entire conversation. That's because of the stress. I have 18 papers due tomorrow, none of which have I started yet. Just like the past four nights, I'll be pulling an all-nighter tonight to finish my work. That's right, I haven't slept in four nights, and I won't sleep tonight. I have to stay up all the time because I of all the work I have. I have a ton of work. Way more than you or anybody else does.
The work I have to do is also harder than the work you have to do. Have you ever had to translate a scroll from Aramaic into Esperanto while at the same time writing a comparison of Spinoza's Ethics to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason? How about doing those things and at the same time writing a technical research paper on anaclitic cephalopods? You should try that, and then get back to me on whether you think your work is hard.
Well, uh-oh, looks like I have another meeting to go to. If you wanted to talk more about how hard your work is, I think I can pencil you in for twelve minutes next Sunday afternoon. How does that work for you?
