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Quick post of a stream of consiouness I had on the way home.
FIrst I was thinking about this post by elfuzz, it’s about the general ennui that post graduates in america feel. I definitly feel the same as him, and it would suck to have people calling me immature, (though of caurse I am). I made this comment about the situation in China and my feelings on the situation.
“five year plans are for communists. Seriously, you don’t often hear chinese people complaining that they don’t know what they want to do with their lives, but you hear americans doing it all the time (i guess that makes fan an american). It’s a good thing though, the chinese don’t complain cuase they don’t have that many options and they are brainwashed into thinkig that a whitecollar job where you have enough money to buy your parents a house is nirvana. I just wish I had a skill I could fall back on if I needed a job, what the fuck did I learn in school? So I know about the interaction of the Neucleus Accumbens and the sertonergic systems, what good does that do me?”
Now that I think about it, in CHina it’s a little more complex. i think a lot of people do feel coflicted over their futures but I don’t think that bitching about it has reached the artform it has in america. i alos think that a lot of people in college feel like they will get a good job, but then get disenchanted with it later on. All in all, it’s not a completly disimilar situation to america for a chinese graduate, but an american has many more choices and the white collar corporate job that I reject my students would kill to have.
Now for some reason that got me thinking about “on the road,” by Keruous and this post at Bokane, which is a wonderful little slice of ex-pat life in china. Someone in the comments section compared the post to “on the road,” but then they had to add the disclaimer that “on the road” is overrated. This is bullshit, I could write a whole nother post on the irony that our ironic generation needs to call a book that practically defined it’s attitude overrated.
Keuroc is our generations Dostoyevky (spelling? I’ll just call him the big D). The Big D’s brilliance was that he he portrayed the imporatance of ideas on society. In russia of his time those were philosophies about politics, utopian politics. The Big D thought that young men’s obbsession with these ideas was very dangerous for society. And with the Bolsheviek revolution and societ union he was proven correct.
Now Keuroc should be read the same way. It should be read as a study of young man reacting to the pressures of ideas. The mistake in analysing keuroc is to analis the philosphy, you need to analyse the interaction of the charecters with philosophy. The philosophy of that time was extientional longing, a feeling that modern life lacked something. This cuased the charecters to become self desturctive in their search for meaning, and if you look at the history of drug abuse and the way that modern youth bitch about how they don’t know what to do when they grom up, Keuroc was right.
Ok so that’s all bullshit, but at least I didn’t use the word “semiotics”.