Academic Rendition

I wanted to ram my head through a cement pillar.

This was not to be an act of preemptive masochism. Nor was this a sudden desire to become one of the tormented youths who routinely inflicts pain on himself for sport--you know, the kid who dyes his hair black, straps a chain to his waist, and writes poems about how all the other kids respond to his misunderstood self-loathing with perfectly timed jokes and conspicuous mockery. No, this was a desire of sheer necessity. Self-anesthetics was the only prescription for enduring the next four hours.

In the fourth week of the MAMEH program, there have been several important revelations. The first is that some of my fellow students clearly believe themselves to be the ubermensch. Whether it's the permanent fixture of their noses at a forty-five degree angle or the love affair they have with the sound of their own voice, the preponderance of arrogance amongst these few can be suffocating at times.

The second revelation is the realization that there is little hope of actually finishing this program within the allotted time frame of two years. There is a reason that TAU gives you up to four years to complete your thesis. The research alone consumes at least a year of one's life. I have just as much of a chance of finishing "on time" as Leigh Tiffin does of being considered a male upon first glance.

The third and currently most important revelation is the fact that some classes are good, some classes are okay, and one is the mental equivalent of a leisurely afternoon of waterboarding. You think you're going to drown and after a little while you reach a point where you hope you're going to drown, but really you're just being strung along in a highly creative, albeit sadistic, effort to break you.

That is Selected Topics in Islamic History. See Islamic History is the last seminar on Tuesday, a day that includes an hour and a half of Hebrew, four hours of Ottoman History (a phenomenal class with an equally phenomenal professor), and another four hours of Islamic History. And these classes are all back-to-back-to-back. We start at 8:00 a.m. and we end at 6:00 p.m. If you want to know where to find Satan, look no further than the TAU scheduling department.

One could objectively assert that this seminar suffers from its place within our schedule. And one would be mistaken. The seminar suffers, along with its attendees, because our professor is duller than a butter knife at a logging competition with as much charisma as a Keanu Reeves cardboard cutout.

Bueller? Bueller?

The guy spends an inexorable amount of time on tangential asides whilst never moving from his chair for four hours. His arms are always crossed. He stares straight ahead. He speaks in a droll, monotonous tone that has you scrambling for instruments with which to stab yourself just to focus the pain elsewhere. And should anyone dare ask him a question, expect either a quick rebuff or a long one.

And thus that's where I found myself at 2:00 this afternoon--standing with coffee in hand, eyes glazed over, mental acuity bordering on catatonic, and searching for something headbutt resistant...that I could headbutt.

I wish I could recall what it was that we discussed. I know it was something about Mohammed killing a lot of folks and something about archaeology and then there was that deviation courtesy of Anna as to whether or not Mohammed even existed. But the only thing that I've been able to recollect from those four lost hours of my life is the disjointed geometric symbols I doodled on the right hand margin of page seventeen of my notebook.

I'll talk. If anyone is listening, I swear I'll tell all. Just make it stop.