Tooting my own horn.

I hate the word tooting.

I just turned in the Feminism in India paper that I stayed up all night writing, and I gotta tell you, it is awesome. I never say anything without putting an "I think" or "I feel" in front of it, but I am saying, objectively, it is awesome. My Dad already read it, and disagrees with my thesis (and he almost never tells me he disagrees with things I write). My professor will probably think that it is ethnocentric. But they would both be wrong. I've noticed, since I've started trying to actually write original thoughts instead of just regurgitating whatever I'm told, that originality and creativity aren't really rewarded in academia. My grades have gone down across the board. I think it's because it's too hard to understand, it actually takes work to listen to what a student is trying to tell you, instead of dismissing it as different than what everybody else is saying. And since I'm only in grad school, professors and TA's think they don't have to give me any credit, since if I'm saying something different, it must mean I haven't understood. But listen, you jackasses, I have understood, and now I am saying this.

If they understood the amount of creativity and integration and synthesis that went into conceiving this paper, they would see too that this paper is awesome, even if parts of it aren't fully formed or need some revision. That's always how things are when you think of something new.

I don't think anyone else will think this paper is awesome, so that's why I am being sure to establish, right here right now, that it is awesome, no matter what anyone thinks. It's not a delusion. It's just that no one else will probably understand, they won't have read the things I've read, and so it won't matter to them that I've pieced together the things I've pieced together. Even I will probably look back at the paper and only see the things I missed, or the ways that I asserted things that didn't deserve to be asserted. But I know that this paper represents a genuine step forward in my learning, and so even if there are mistakes, they will be mistakes that lead to better understanding, and so I'm glad to have made them. Sometimes, you need to say one thing before you can say another. And what I've said, I've said fully and precisely, and it feels good. I don't really want anyone else to read it, because I don't want to have to bother explaining and fending off the objections, and I don't want to run the risk of having my new-and-revolutionary judged as misguided-and-mediocre by someone else. So it will be my secret pride and joy. It's the sort of thing that education should be all about.