A new start…that’s what I want.
Today kinda sucks. I’m feeling down, and times are tough for me as well as for many people I know.
Today marked the day to turn in my senior thesis and give my presentation. The paper came out to be a watered down caricature of what I originally intended, so I’m not too pleased about it. But the university was so specific on what it wanted and try as I might, I just couldn’t seem to deliver the fluffy proposals they expected. The professor complained that the topic went “too global,” but hell, the paper was on U.S. foreign policy in relation to the “war on drugs” initiatives in Colombia. It was butchered every time a draft was submitted, with most of the originally content omitted, saying it needed to be replaced with specific actions my partnered organization (the AFSC) might be able to implement. But what can they do if not focus on changing or impeding U.S. foreign policy?
They wanted feel-good antidotes and proposals such as “take the message to the Latino community” and the like, as if Latinos coming into the U.S. from other parts of Latin America are truly all that concerned about the fate of Colombia, especially if it means going toe-to-toe with the U.S. government. Well, I didn’t see that as the course of action likely to yield the best results, so instead I tried waxing philosophically about organizations sharing at least one thing in common (like a peace-building mission) coming together to consolidate their efforts and literature to focus on the human cause instead of continuing to devote attention to factions thereof. Basically for organizations (especially those catering to different causes) to share information with one another and create a dialogue, paying more than lip service toward sorting out the rudimentary problems responsible for much of the oppression and state-sanctioned violence, like nationalist hegemony and the dominant Eurocentrist worldview. These factors underly the U.S. foreign policies just as they impact our culture’s treatment of “minority” races. Eurocentrism is fundamentally responsible for our treatment of women and members of the GLBT community. So why not encourage organizations to look outside the box versus continuing down separatist narrow paths that seek to categorize people by cause, rendering us unable to unify to address the over-arching human rights issues regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, creed or any other arbitrary criteria used to discriminate against one another?
It made the most sense to me at the time. If you want fluff, well, that’s as close as I could come to it. I’m not going to sit here pretending that if the AFSC just passed out more bumper stickers they’d garner more public support. Besides, they’re a laid-back, non-intrusive organization that prefers not to be in the public’s face, shouting reasons for them to care about a given issue. Unlike Planned Parenthood or PETA and others that utilize aggressive tactics to draw attention to themselves. I just didn’t feel right telling an organization that’s been in existence for 91 years what it ought to do to be more “successful,” especially considering that they’ll be receiving a copy of my paper. Maybe I could have bullshitted and played along as I’ve done so many times before, but it just didn’t feel right to do so this time. And the paper was cut apart many times before its final submission, so I’m not even sure its original intent is discernible anymore.
It will be 2 weeks before I find out if it passed the cut. If it didn’t, I’ll have to write another paper, taking another two months and locating yet another organization to “help.” Which means I won’t graduate in October as planned. But I’m so burnt out on school right now that I can barely stand the thought of going through this again. It’s not an A paper, and my professor even said that, but I pray it’s given at least a C. Please. I just want to graduate.
If this paper fails, it will be the second ever to do so out all that I’ve written. The other was a paper years back on Gerontology, a subject I’m not terribly fond of. My writing is generally thought to be pretty good, but this time I’m just not so sure. It’s tough to keep the faith when the university isn’t showing much support of your ideas. It’s not like I came up with anything new or tried to reinvent the wheel here; I just didn’t want to pass off garbage that might please the administration when I know it’s worthless. But I’ve played the game long enough to know better than that and should probably have just given them what they want. It’s not worth failing over, but I respect my chosen organization and didn’t want to offer them generic, feel-good antidotes that you’d typically expect in a college paper.
One of the mystery candidates who will be grading my senior thesis could wind up being a male instructor who taught my criminal investigations course a few terms back. He and I do not get along nor do we see eye to eye on just about any topic, so I worry about his impartiality in critiquing the paper. *sigh* I almost passed out when I heard today he may be the one grading me. He’s the only instructor at this university that I’ve butt heads with, so naturally he’d be the one to review my project, right?
Ugh…I’m just not happy today. It’s stressing me out and now I get to wait 2 weeks to hear the verdict on my grade. Two weeks is a long time to hold one’s breath.
I called my brother tonight and spoke with him for a while. But nothing seems to cheer me right now. Maybe I just need to go lie down.
Newsvine
