Redundant Redundancies of Redundant Redundance

Welcome to the Agglomeration

I wasn't going to blog about anything today because I've been feeling a bit like Harper Lee after writing 'To Kill a Mockingbird'. My last post was so ingenious and creatively enriching that I felt nothing I could possibly do could surmount that insurmountable peak of blogging nearperfection. However, recent events have cased a buildup of irritation and annoyance that my rage simply must be vented somewhere. There is no guarantee that it will result in a mildly cohesive and logical blog post, but I guess your best chance as a reader is to take a deep breath, eat some cheesecake and read onward while hoping for the best. Alternatively, if you're William, skip everything there is to come and stop reading here.

The first thing that annoyed me was surprise surprise, TOK class on Friday. We received our assessment criteria for the entire course and to my amazement and sheer disbelief, it outlined that all students had to maintain both a journal (full of reflections captured from supernatural mirrors and stored in a easy to access Word File) and a scrapbook (full of banana peels and carrion captured from the back of garbage trucks and stored in a vulture-attracting vault). My first reaction was, 'What the Redundant?' My second reaction was 'That's redundant!' Deciding to end the potentially infinitely regressable vicious cycle here, my point is that I believe these two concepts should be about as mutually exclusive as matter and antimatter.

Another thing that I find constantly annoys me is the pace of TOK. I'm probably the only person in the class who is actively trying to accelerate this metaphorical snail, but my metaphorical snail propellant is being disabled by a metaphorical metaphorical snail propellant disabling machine. I mean, another noticeable factor of TOK is how similiar to a Year 7 style of learning it is. I came into the course expecting philosophical debates, the discussion of ethical issues and a style of higher level thinking that could challenge the way I think about things. At the moment, the only thing that is being challenged is the thought why I ever thought I'd enjoy TOK. All we seem to do in classes is read handouts, because you know, reading is a very important skill quinessential to the success of the IB. And pretty much everything else I could think of that has occurred in the past 10-12 years of our lives. What's worse, every time I try to move the progress forward by saying 'We've done this last lesson. Let's do this', I am confronted with the usual reply of 'Let's read it again.' You know, because we humans tend to forget everything that hasn't happened in the last 2 hours or so. Although I wish we did, so I wouldn't have to remember the second thing that has thoroughly annoyed me today.

A good friend of mine somehow stumbled onto the issue of crushes, which is something that I find a pointless area of discussion, because if you're not sceptical enough to realise that since these things are private issues and people are capable of lying to you, then you might as well click the next pop up that tells you've won $100,000,000, give all your details to the Sicilian Mafia, and then commit suicide by eating money blended in a concoction filled with nitric acid, nuclear waste, sludge from the exhaust of a car, and cat vomit. No i'm not talking about how to make homemade lemon juice, but again, I wish I were.

But what's the point? There exist few people that can cure such irritation because when they try to comfort you by talking to you, they end up exacerbating the problem. And so by the end of this shortened rant (because you know, apparently all of you are too lazy to read long posts which I put a lot of effort into) I still feel like there's a part of me that still wants to break something. I guess if there is a cure for unhappiness, it's probably some narcotic or illicit substance that is a bit like taking the edge of the pain of your broken finger by sawing your leg in half with a hacksaw.

I like this final opportunity to ridicule a phrase used by a close friend of mine:

Happiness may be relative, but when your relatives die, they stay dead.

And on a more serious and somber note, I am saddened to hear of the death of Susan Tsvangirai, who was killed in an accident when her vehicle was sideswiped by a US contractor truck. I hope her husband pulls through and has a stronger resolve than ever to ensure that the tyranny in Zimbabwe under the iron fist of Robert Mugabe is finally ended.

And now off to I go to entertain my sorrows.

Till next time, may you agglomerate all your unpremeditated contempations.