Dust thou understand world literature?  Dust thee do not, at least not yet.  So, I haven’t blogged in a while and as you may have guessed my college honeymoon period is over.  It’s been a long year (including a summer “vacation” with children–don’t get me started) of studying, writing, and analyzing.  Enough is enough.  And just as the honeymoon is over and I am determined to find more time to write and keep up on this blog, behold, ye olde literature comes lurking via the internet and my on-line school.  Literature requires me to read and yes, write a lot, and by very specific direction which leaves no room for the imagination or my patience.  Just to spite my instructor, I am now going off the beaten path and write what the hell I want the way I want yet with irony and mockery of my education.  Something must be sinking in, however, because I wrote an outline for this blog prior to beginning this writing journey.  I am now an official learned person and can recognize that education holds no conformity.  What?

Anywho, as I said, literature is my current subject along with accounting.  They obviously have nothing to do with the other and I think that’s funny.  What if my accounting papers start to sound like “How dust thou define debits and credits under the law of the Sabbath or from whence we came?”  Huh?  That’s a joke, but it is not too hard to believe that I easily see that happening.  I also recognize that that sentence is wordy and could have easily been summed up, but I refuse.  I also recognize that I say recognize a lot and don’t know why so I will blame that one on college.  But this is my blog damn it!  The last time I studied literature I actually liked it and remember reading it, but that was in high school when everyone had really bad hair and ironic loss of virginity despite having no taste in physical appearance.  That’s why that is ironic, duh.

So far this year I have picked up equilibriams, e-commerce, the laws of supply and demand, student protest, Nixon, the Cold War, etc., but can’t for the life of me decipher literature or why I have to decipher it at all.  I like Hawthorne and all, but we have Hollywood now–I should not have to figure out his meanings without Demi Moore!  Plot, setting, symbolism, blah, blah, blah.  I get what those things are but how can I enjoy the reading material if it gives me a migraine the size of Shakespeare’s ego?  “I must apologize for Sabbath last.”  You mean last Sunday?  Just say that!!  Most of these so called “good” writers came from a time when a public hanging was considered a social and entertaining occasion and as big as Monday night Football.  These literary so-called masters also believed in witches and spells and that birthmarks were a sign of the devil.  Why should I believe anything these writers have to say?

The answer is:  because my instructor says so.  For some mute reason these writings of great literature are important to the literary canon of society.  What?  I am majoring in business management and I would like to know how “having kept covenant by meeting thee here, it is my purpose now to return whence I came.  I have scruples touching the matter thou wot’st of” is going to help me manage a restaurant and deal with a staff that has trouble with writing down medium or medium rare.  Will I hire a better chef?  Is this how managers become bitchy?  Am I secretly being trained as an English spy or that of a weiry drone lost in an enigma wrapped in a riddle?  Huh?

As a writer I find it ironic that I am frustrated with my literature course.  Naturally, none of the literature I remember from my youth is included in the syllabus.  I meant when I was a kid, yes.  Well, I’m off to Toys R Us to beg for a job and maybe I can woo them with my exestential knowledge of symbolism for which I have a simple hand gesture to satisfy them.