apathy and academics

Final grades came out today. I did well in everything except Natural Language Processing, which I took as an elective because I thought it would be interesting. How wrong I was. Though I can't really tell whether my distaste for the class is because I didn't do well in it, or whether there is some other sort of relationship between these facts. The lectures were so **fucking** useless that the only explanation for the ridiculously high average is that some kind of black magic was at play. I wouldn't put it past the professor. Her sort of pleasant, highly likeable personages have been known to beguile and undermine unsuspecting students. Anyway, I stopped caring about that class two thirds of the way through it, and have accepted my ever-falling GPA (the end is nigh, THANK GOODNESS) with the placid equanimity of the true apathetic. (The noun form does not seem to exist, but it should. Therefore I declare that it shall exist. Take flight, O word, like a bird or something; alight on the tongues of people who have halted for too long in search of the name which describes most faithfully their relationship to life.)

My seventh year of blogging is halfway finished, college is reaching its much-longed-for terminus, and Bleach is entering the final stage of senility, which is the most exciting stage. What more can a mere human being ask for?

I finished Messiah by Gore Vidal on the flight home. It was very good, unlike The Judgement of Paris, which was written just two years before. I don't know what went wrong with JoP, but it probably wasn't lack of experience. How otherwise, except by making reference to a divine afflatus of some sort, would one explain Messiah? I was, it must be mentioned, most amused that GV chose to name his principal character Eugene Luther after himself: Eugene Luther Gore Vidal. I've always wondered whether Gore Vidal was just his pen name or whether he discarded his first two names in all other facets of his life.