Just a general, kinda tired and cranky query to the general public but especially my pointy-headed friends in academia.
Do you guys ever get frustrated because you feel like if you have to be doing something so cutting edge and novel it doesn't even have a Wikipedia page yet?
I am just trying to write a project proposal and I feel so un-original, un-inspired and washed-up (and yes, I know, I haven't even written a fucking page of my thesis yet), that I feel like writing an opener like;
"I, like so many other young women in academia who keenly feel the knife-blade of injustice pressing against their creativity, nay even their humanity; would like to explore how youth working with media as a tool for creative resistance.. blah blah blah blah... end page. (and also set lit-match to manuscript)."
Why do I feel this incredible compulsion to be doing something different, so awesome, so entirely unexplored. It's all ego.
If someone in the 14th century had offered me a big plumy hat, a cutlass, a boat, and a pack of dirty sailors and said; "Hey Mir go sail the high seas and name some unexplored chunk of land after yourself." I would have been on that like a rat on cheese. I am a giant egoist.
Maybe I just like sailors???
Do you guys ever get
Kids rapping on their street corner in LA. Roof-top films. Retirees taking photos of their neighbor's vegetable garden. An impromptu soccer game on a dirt street in Nakuru... Bam - community media.
That was easy. Next?
:p