In yesterday’s post, I was writing about flaws and positive attributes, then I wandered off the road as I tend to do. My main point was that we all have flaws. It’s part of being human. Think of how boring we would be if we didn’t.
There are flaws I have that I know I’m not going to change. Such as working to the back of a deadline. I will get an assignment/task done on time. However, I will get it done at the last minute possible. I do admire people who are able to do a task as soon as they get it (like pay a bill before that was all automated), but that’s not me. It caused me a lot of stress in college. Not because I didn’t get my assigments turned in on time; I did. But because I would waste the whole time before the deadline stressing about it.
I had a class in which the only grade for the whole semester was one paper at the end of said semester. That’s not entirely true. We were also graded on class participation, but that was maybe a quarter of the grade. Most of it was on one paper. The class was Psychology Through Biography. The assignment was to pick a person and write an analysis of their psychology. The professor was an older man who was very close to retirement and clearly could not give a fuck about the class. I liked him, but he was definitely a crotchety old man.
I chose Tina Turner after much consternation. I wanted to do an Asian women, but there were none of note at the time. Or rather, none for whom I could find enough resources to base a seventy-plus paper on. I also thought about seeing if I could interview a murderer–let me explain. At the time, there was a young black man (who went to my high school, by the way, when I did) who killed a gay senator and another gay man–and he wrote a manifesto about how much he hated gay men for spreading AIDS. He believed he had it himself, but it was never proven if he did or not (the fact that he’s sitting in a jail cell decades later says, probably not). He had been a student at Bethel College, a very Christian college, and he was clearly troubled. He had not shown that in high school, but he was strange–and that’s not me saying taht in retrospect.
I wanted to interview him, but I could not swing that, obviously. I decided Tina Turner would be an interesting case study because of her tragic history, but also because she was a woman of color in a time when that was not acceptable. More to the point, she was clearly sexual and had no qualms about showcasing t hat. Now, a conscientious student would have started researching in a month or so, then written the paper over the semester. I was not that conscientious student. I was and am very smart. Learning is easy for me, for the most part. This is both a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing for obvious reasons, but it’s a curse because I rest on my laurels. I’m trying to not say I’m sazy so much, but, well, it’s not far from wrong.