The Research Paper that Ate My Column

If this column seems unusually, I don’t know, crappy, I blame the research paper. Yes, the research paper ate my column.

I’ve begun a graduate program in media management through the University of Missouri’s Journalism School. It’s all online, designed for working-class stiffs like me who don’t have the time to move up to the frozen tundra of Missouri and who have always preferred going to class in their boxer shorts at all hours of the night. That, in fact, was the marketing ploy that sold me on the program — “midnight in your underwear.”

Anyway, I’m really enjoying it, but it takes a bit of adjustment to become a student again. At Flagler College, I’m surrounded by students all the time. But they look up to me as a mentor, a genius and a dashing man of wisdom, which is what the sign on my door reads.

I say things to them like, “look here, whippersnapper” or “at what point did you realize your brain had fallen out?”

I coach them, and scold them, and they on a weekly basis let the air out of my tires.

But now, well, now I’m dumb again. How did I ever sink down the totem pole of knowledge so far, so fast? Mind you, I’m doing well in my first class — media ethics — but it’s hard. I have to think!

And read. I read a lot, which is tough considering I’m the geriatric turtle of reading. I blame it on my dyslexia, but it could also be my total lack of an attention span — I have a proclivity to be distracted by barking squirrels. I wonder to myself, “Do they actually think that turns on the ladies?” and “You know, I wonder if that turns on the ladies?”

You read, and you read, and you read, then you discuss it all online in Internet chatrooms. You get to a point where you don’t want to see words anymore. You don’t want to read anymore!

And now there’s the research paper, a 10-plus-page case study of some ethical issue of our choosing. Ooooh! Not that writing is that difficult for me. Look at this, I’m an hour past deadline, and I’m cruising along at 400 words already. But this is mindless drivel. My columns are about babies or how rats got into the winter rye in my shed. They overate to the point that I got a lawsuit claiming I need to pay for their Weight Watchers.

But this research paper is serious business. With serious thinking, and serious words. Words that, quite frankly, I don’t understand. Duality? Epistemological? Discursive? Focus? What the heck is that last one?

Whole paragraphs read like this, and I’ve burned out two dictionaries trying to keep up. A typical graph: “The systemic nature of cultural, epistemological duality in a cross-pollinated, multi-plexicated, counter-topograted bifocal of transcendental adjudication is overwhelming in its simplicity.”

What the … ? And I’m supposed to write 10 pages like this?

I get going, start adding in some research, a pinch of original thought, stir in some transition, get all excited because I’m making progress, really start getting into it, really start hitting the keys ferociously, really start to get the juices bubbling, really start to get into a fevered pitch and then after 8 hours of sweaty work, I glance down at the page count to realize– WHAT! — only two %@&!# pages! Oh my God, I’m doomed!

Then it occurs to me, the only way to get to 10 pages is to use the big words I can’t understand. So off to the dictionary I go with basket in hand like a strawberry picker. Scholarly thought, I’m finding, is not about whether you know what something means. Rather, it’s that you use it in such a convincing way that people THINK they know what you mean. And if there’s one skill I have, it’s that one.

So wish me luck, and in the meantime, sorry about the column.

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