excuses excuses.....

I was entirely suspicious this week when a letter arrived with the official Goldsmith’s stamp emblazoned across the envelope. The only times the university actually manages to be systematic enough to send out official post to you is either when they are requesting money, (such as the seventy pounds mysteriously appealed for last week citing some sort of administration fees) or if you’re in trouble. Luckily for my pitiable student loan, it was the latter. Apparently my attendance had not been up to par and I was one step away from an official warning. I was outraged; the main point to university is to miss one or two lectures here and there. Surely it’s the only time in life when a sick day a week is acceptable? Besides I didn’t think I’d done too badly at the whole demanding deed of dragging myself out of bed three days a week for a challenging two whole hours of classes. Mentally running the past six weeks over in my mind, the culprit slowly became clear, ah yes, the Thursday seminar.
The problem is, in an environment as lethargic as university, it is wholly acceptable to justify any wrongdoings academically with the most pathetic excuse possible, such as, ‘Well I’ve been to that lecture for the last three weeks running, isn’t it perhaps time I deserved a break?’ or ‘I’ve missed everything else this week, surely its’ better just to continue with it and then really knuckle down next week?’ Unfortunately these excuses seem to come without too much thought these days, and funnily enough are readily available at nine o’ clock when your alarm clock cuts through a hangover.
In all fairness it wasn’t actually my fault (excuse alert). Thursday mornings haven’t actually been a good time for me all year. The first Thursday seminar I missed I really did have a very good excuse; I was begging our landlord not to evict us after our neighbours called him complaining about our ‘small gathering’ that may or may not have got slightly out of hand the previous evening, and of course, as I need somewhere to live and I was the only one awake to deal with it, it does make a perfectly logical reason to miss the seminar.
The week after that however I did indeed attend in full spirits, ready to make up what I had missed, with all 196 pages of The Catcher in the Rye stored away in my memory, only to meet a class full of the most sour-faced, miserable wretches I have ever met, headed by this submissive, half-hippie teacher, and not the good hippie kind like my senior school English teacher who read the book like totally stoned and then talks about how it like totally spoke to them, no no, the other kind, the kind who spent a decade stoned and now nothing means anything to them. If that class was a colour it would have been like totally grey man.
Let me explain what a seminar is meant to consist of. It should be the lecturer or teacher prompting a discussion with some insightful question concerning the set reading that provokes a lively and/or intellectual debate amongst the students. I am of the opinion that, if at twenty years old and on an English course at a successful university, you are too shy to spit out a measly line citing some GCSE reference to the form or context of a novel, then you aren’t really going far in life. For an hour, I was the only one who spoke, bar the lecturer, who like totally appreciated my input man. I left wondering why I had disentangled myself from the comfort of my bed. You can see perhaps why I was not motivated to go back.
In my defence, (more excuses ahead) I have actually done all the work, and, believe it or not, background research. I have also attended pretty much all of my other lectures and seminars. The problem is, those ones inspire me, I enjoy them, whereas on the days of a Thursday Grey Day, lets face it, I’d rather stay in bed.