Wasting Time

I had always suspected that one has to do barely any work to get through school.

A friend who worked in the battery industry once told me that it costs x dollars in R&D to make an amazingly complicated battery... and that it costs x times 500 to improve that battery by another 2%. I think the same thing applies to school work. It takes x effort to get a B+... and it takes x times 500 to get an A-. Maybe the difference is even greater than that.

I've been aiming to pass... and I've been overshooting the target. The worst paper I ever wrote (which is considerably worse than the second worst paper I ever wrote) turned out to be a B+ paper. I could have spent another 2 weeks on it... and I probably would have ended up with an A paper... but that would not have been rewarded in any meaningful way. I am no longer striving for excellence. Mediocrity takes a lot less work, and in the end, no one is going to ask to see my transcript.

Any forays into the academic world of Slavic philology will be preceded by extensive, fresh undergraduate work, which will cancel out any doubt that my current academic standing casts upon me. And MFAs are all about portfolios anyway. This particular masters really is just passing time. By the end of this month, I'll be a quarter of the way through. And by August, I'll be a third of the way through. It'll be far too late to quit. It is far too late to quit.