Popagandhi

The whole problem with being in school is, well, that you have to study. This is something I am very bad at; I never learned to study, nobody ever taught me how to, and I certainly don’t intend to pick up on this bad habit called studying. For all general intentions and purposes my inability to perform rigorous and active ’study’ has served me well, with no glaring lack in most areas. Yet in a university environment — read: filled with the very people who excelled that that thing I did badly, study — I’m starting to cave in and maybe start trying to learn how. At age twenty.

For thus long I’ve never grasped the fine art of colour coding notes, learned how to index cards, or even the skill of making notes. My handwriting is not your regular kind of bad. It is so absurdly bad, I can’t read it: reading notes I make takes a similarly absurd amount of time. With no sense of colour coordination, there can only be one black pen in my pencil case at any time. Too many colours, and I get confused. What do I do with more than two pens, more than two colours? What do I do with a highlighter? Memory mnemonics such as mindmaps or slides don’t help. An exceedingly verbal (and verbose) person, I thrive on scanning through blobs of text at a time. When asked by classmates or juniors for that strange thing, “notes”, I don’t know how to react: assorted subject representatives stopped making notes for me, knowing I never bothered with them; instead of stacks of “notes” I had stacks of books in which I read through once, and again for revision, yet was still more efficient than my limp attempts to make notes of any kind. I glance at mindmaps and summarized points and cannot make the necessary connections, lacking much visual ability.

But if I could have known there are to be worse things to higher education than the need to study, I would ask of higher powers only one request: to spare me from having to work on projects with obnoxious Italian men who can’t shut up on anything, even if nothing at all. It’s a shame we’re studying Mussolini, not Emperor Hirohito or the Chinese dynasty, because “My grandfather and my grandmother”, too, told me a lot about the World War II and the Japanese Occupation, but I don’t necessarily think myself an expert on the subject, and certainly don’t fancy myself as having direct access to to a Chinese emperor, as he seems to towards a dead Italian dictator.

Belive, Obey, Fight. Mussolini(’s grandson) is always right.