Smirk.

I'm trying here folks, I'm really trying. I do my best to be tight-lipped about academic stuff. I fully realize that everyone has their own learning curve and their own level of comfort when it comes to learning, or more specifically, reading. I know I have moments of weakness, but I try to not let my scholastic and literary snobbishness get in the way, and I'd like to believe that I do a pretty okay job at it most of the time.

Tonight, I just have to let a little bit out.

As usual, I was at the coffee shop. I am currently reading a book (borrowed from my buddy Nate) called The Dumbest Generation. I won't necessarily recommend it unless you have particular interest in media studies, teaching, or literacy, as it is really the equivalent of a doctoral thesis written on those topics by a college professor. (Complete with 20+ page bibliography...) Still, it's a compelling read on how perceptions of this generation, who finally has been given a legit label "Generation DotNet". I like it. Anyhow, it discusses the perceptions of the involvement of the computer and media in our lives and if we (I'm talking basically people who are thirty and younger) are indeed as dumb as people make us out to be. The jury is still out on the answer to that theory, but right now, it doesn't look especially promising.

So, with that in mind, I sat near a trio of folks probably in their laaaate teens or early early twenties tonight as I was reading. There were two females and their exceptionally gay male friend (not that there's anything wrong with that). They sat around the entire two hours or so that I was there and were generally very well contained, but then again, I did have my headphones on. At one point, they struck up a conversation with another woman in the cafe who was wearing a polo shirt from a local high school. I won't name it, but for you San Franciscans, it's a Jesuit school located in the Sunset district. For you non-San Franciscans, it's a VERY expensive private Catholic school known for its over-achieving preppy grads (and for keggers in a local park almost every Friday night).

So I'm sitting there reading about how the new generation hates reading (I find it ironic that I'm sitting there, a Lit master's student, trying to take serious a guy who is claiming that my generation couldn't give a damn about physical books or actually reading) and how multi-task reading via the internet is the wave of the future. As I'm reading this, I'm getting a tad indignant because, with the exception of a very select few people in my life (most of whom are blood relatives), I am surrounded by readers. Even friends who had nothing at all to do with literature in their studies are still avid pleasure readers. But I digress...

So as I'm packing up, I was inspired to hear the aforementioned trio discussing reading. I was even surprised to hear some major works get thrown around, like Lolita. Then all faith was lost. The one girl said "You know what book I've always felt like I should read? Don Quixote. It's supposed to be like, great and all, but really, I mean, come on - have you seen that book? It's like, I don't know, a thousand pages or something. Who has ever read a book that long? Who would want to? That would be like, torture to me. I guess I could maybe get it on audio book, but still, do I have like five hours to hear some person sit around and read a book to me? No. Oh well, I guess I can just read the synopsis on Wikipedia or something."

Ouch.

I appreciate that she has the curiosity to want to know more about the book, and I know that for some people a thousand page book can be a grueling endeavor. That's not quite the issue I take, though I did smirk a bit. But really... wikipedia? Really?? It's great for pop culture stuff. It's an easy way to get a lot of simple information and facts. But reading a summary on a book instead of even getting the audio book? This from a kid whose parents spent somewhere between forty and fifty thousand dollars to put their child through high school so she can get into her choice of the nation's most expensive universities. Now I've never read Don Quixote myself. Perhaps one day. But until that day come, you can bet for damn sure that I'll never go to Wikipedia to read a summary with the hopes that I can bring up some minor plot line in class or anything like that.


One final gripe, completely unrelated to all this. Fuck you, California legislature, for this hands-free law. You've managed to successfully turn me into something I hate - a weirdo with a bluetooth earpiece. See, my phone pretty much sucks monkey nuts, and I hope not to have it much longer, so I decided that rather than dropping like twenty or thirty bucks on a hands-free apparatus that I will disregard when I get rid of my sad excuse for a cell phone, I would shell out forty-something dollars and get a hands-free headset I can use with any phone I happen to next buy. That doesn't make it any easier to strap on that little blue-blinking doo dad to my ear.