letters to strangers

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Sometimes I wonder what it's like to feel educated. What makes you feel educated? Is it a sense of superiority? An ego? A placement test? A job?

And what would life be like without all of these educated people? Without technological advancements. Without anything. What if life was simple? What if we weren't choked by smog, or chewing on carcinogens all day long?

I don't feel educated. I don't even feel intelligent. I feel incredibly, ridiculously even, distraught in an academic society. I feel stupid. I feel like I am activating my brain, but it's not really doing anything. I feel completely insecure about everything. It is very, very strange.

In college we discuss brow-raising topics such as education, critical thinking, prostitution, social problems, pornography, and more, and even though it interests me, and even though I am listening and interested, I feel stupid. I feel engaged, but I feel ignorant. I feel as if I am being educated, but I'm not learning.

In another sense I feel as if I have lost every conceivable ability to be creative. I feel cookie-cutter-classic, and I feel insane. My ability to self-expression has dwindled to forced imagery and mathematical thinking. I get frustrated with words, I feel my sense of rhythm is inadequate, that I inside my artist is dying and my Member of the Labor Union is rising up, full-force, ready to stick me in the eye if I turn the other cheek.

My sense of humor is confused. My social life is lost.
I don't really miss the latter, though.

This cement institution, ground into dirt until it feels solid as rock even underneath, is draining me of everything. I look at the way I write and it feels mechanical and unpoetical. I am more concerned with the correct use of semi-colons, apostrophes. Did I do that write? Don't you see?

I need to paint something, but I get locked in realism. I want to draw, but it is chunky and square. I can only touch, and create things of function, and it is eating at me.

Muse-less amusement.