Sometimes, you just want something inanimate to be sentient. When you are walking along, distracted by some sort of untold mystery of the world and its contents, you may bash your toe against a chair leg. You will swear, groan and hit the chair. Then, you’ll realize the chair is incapable of feeling any such pain. You’ll wish you could give it life, just so you can force it to experience the same level of pain it has caused you, and then be responsible for the inevitable existential identity crisis that comes along with consciousness in a world of its unconscious siblings. Fun stuff.
This desire doesn’t necessary make you a bad person; there was a fairly good chance you were already one to begin with. However, there are, indeed, some objects believed to truly deserve sentient thought: a difficult course book.
We’ve all had that one class where the professor assigns a text that is intentionally difficult to read. One that requires many hours of painstaking sitting while waiting for some of these exceptionally esoteric lines to connect and maybe make some sense. You look online for study guides, summaries, people online willing to read to you in exchange for a cuddling session, but you find no results. It seems the recesses of the Internet are just as lost on how exactly to tackle this difficult text. You don’t get it, and suddenly, you are overcome with anger.
A relatable and all too frequent occurring human instinct is to react angrily and violently when something is in the realms of being beyond our understandability. We lash out, start wars, burn precious documents all to alleviate our insecurities in our ability to do something we have been told we wouldn’t be able to do. This compulsion is difficult to fight; some would say it’s like fighting against biology, science or your proctologist.
And you know what? Sometimes, it’s OK to give into this anger. Go ahead throw that difficult text across the room! Grab a pair of the no-no scissors your housemates keep locked up because of one failed experiment with corn rows and stab that book! Stab it over and over again! Release that pent up rage, and let the book have it. Every hole is an hour spent trying to understand its meaning. Every hole is an understanding that this book is just an accumulation of text that has been scratched with ink. It does not have any real power over you.
The next step is to go out and get a job or cough up some cash because books are not inexpensive, and you will probably require a copy of it to do the assignment because if you didn’t think you’d need it you wouldn’t have gone through that cathartic spree of madness. Also, apologize to the book you attacked! Shame on you! That book didn’t deserve that; it has feelings and is a part of a collective that must be cherished in this digital era. Alas, it should have helped you though. So, good luck, and remember to take notes in class.
