I visited my old college yesterday (and by "old" I mean, I graduated last May) to speak to the fresh-faced and wide-eyed English majors and offer them the wisdom I've acquired my 22-ish years. And, you know what, it was great. I hope they took something away from it, not just from me but from the other panelists; my biggest surprise was how much I took away from it. I spoke a lot about the things that I should be doing but haven't been doing. Time to practice what I preach, walk the walk, yadda yadda yadda. Case in point: my attempt to update this thing. We shall see!
(Just sharing this article. Got it from Salon.com ) Like so many depressive, creative, extremely lazy high-school students, I was saved by English class. I struggled with math and had no interest in sports. Science I found interesting, but it required studying. I attended a middling high school in central Virginia in the mid-'90s, so there were no lofty electives to stoke my artistic sensibility -- no A.P. art history or African-American studies or language courses in Mandarin or Portuguese. I lived for English, for reading. I spent so much of my adolescence feeling different and awkward, and those first canonical books I read, those first discoveries of Joyce, of Keats, of Sylvia Plath and Fitzgerald, were a revelation. Without them, I probably would have turned to hard drugs, or worse, one of those Young Life chapters so popular with my peers. So I won't deny that I owe a debt to the traditional high-school English class, the class in which I first learned to read literat...
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