I will soon have to change the tagline for my tumblog again, since I am officially moving on from the school and place which inspired, “The slight hipster leanings of a young man reluctantly learning to change the world…”
But, before I do make that switch (and I’m not sure when I will, or quite what it will change to), I would like to make a very brief, completely facetious, argument for my being a God among men when it comes to ‘Just Faking It.’
I spent the last four or so months in a place that, for at least one quarter of the time, had high temperatures in the 100s. Beyond that, I spent pretty much the first two months feeling alternately sorry for myself, upset at the program/courses, lonely, and pretty sure that I would never find something to make me happy.
With all that emoting, it is probably not surprising that schoolwork and engagement in classes were low on my list of priorities. This is where my being the best faker in the world comes in.
I just got my grades back for the semester, and I have achieved straight A minuses, which is slightly better than my overall GPA in college (and for much of college, I was engaged in my classes and committed to school work). Yes, I am tooting my own horn here, but not for the reason you would expect. I am not trying to prove to you that I’m smart. Rather, I’m telling you that I did all that without trying all that hard—I faked my way to straight As (and yeah, the rhyme was intentional).
There you have it. I am the Hercules of faking achievement—less than a God, but more than a man. I dare you to find any holes in my case!*
Next time I check in, I’ll likely have driven several thousand miles in a rented truck.
Good night, y’all.
* More realistically, my grades, given my effort level, indicate that I was right on in my early assessment of the program’s lacking rigor. For much of the time, I felt that the students, professors and courses all had an air of amateurism about them (maybe ‘amateurism’ is too harsh, but it didn’t feel any different from undergraduate government courses, and undergraduate government students are not the best students I’ve encountered, nor are the professors in those classes always the greatest; the classes I had, and likely would have had down the line, are not challenging enough for me, as pretentious as that sounds).
Like Jeff Tweedy, I have reservations about so many things, but the decision to leave here is not one of them. I will look back fondly on Austin as a place where I could have been, and maybe someday could be, happy. But, as for the program—I had no need for it, and I would like the next thing I do to take me far away from the world and people I’ve glimpsed over the past year, starting in DC and continuing to the LBJ School of Public Affairs. If I am bound for something good, or great, it do not believe it involves anything or anyone I have come across since August 2008.
