11am recitation

We had the most insane discussion today.

To preface, let me tell you about this recitation. Pretty much I have the most amazing TA ever. Like, I'm not sure what I'm going to get on my 2nd paper so perhaps I will feel a little less enthusiastic if I didn't do so well, but grades and formalities aside, like wow. She's the best! She has all these little quirks about her - the way she dresses, the thoughts she obsesses over, the way she fans herself with her hands and has mini-freakout-sessions in the middle of a comment or anecdote, the way she exclaims the f-bomb and the d-word every other sentence. It's crazy! She's crazy! And every time I walk out, I'm like wow, what the heck just happened. But it's not like a whaaaat I am so lost and I hate this class. In fact, I walk out always thinking, this is what an English class should be about - discussions and sharing and freaking out over language together and all that jazzy stuff that makes English so addictive.

Basically, she posed the question — What if our professor walked into class on Monday, held up a book/text/whatever, and said, "This is crap. There is no meaning."? What would we think, how would we react?

And we were just like, well...we would probably think she was having a bad day or something. Maybe we would care, maybe we wouldn't care. Maybe we'd get riled up, maybe we'd dismiss it as just an opinion. But we agreed that there is meaning to each and every one of us, so whatever she said wouldn't affect us.

Of course, how the discussion actually went, with all of its little intricacies, I can't clearly explain or describe - you kinda just had to be there. But it was such a meta-literary/meta-something moment (I'm not sure if that makes sense) where you were sitting in a literature class, where you're supposed to constantly be digging out or creating or offering or imposing or interpreting meaning out of everything, every word, comma, space and yet, there we were, discussing the possibility that literature itself at its core doesn't have any meaning at all! What the heck!

And perhaps for those who hate books/reading/words and think that all English majors are good at doing is making something out of nothing or BS-ing their way through assignments, you've always thought this, so this is nothing mindblowing to you. Literature has no answer, no conclusion. It's too subjective, it's not logical, it runs circles around itself. THERE IS NO MEANING.

But you know what? If literature had no meaning, words would have no meaning. And if words had no meaning, the Bible would have no meaning. And if the Bible had no meaning, my life would have no meaning. So basically, not to say that literature = eternal truth or that Bible = fiction, but foreals yo, there IS meaning in literature and language.

I could go on and on and on and on about how much I love my TA and how much I love English and how much I love the Bible, but I think I should stop and do work now...

As my TA would say, "D___!"