What I'd give to be a poet right now...

Today, in my college world, the mandatory freshman activities are finished.

1. No more icebreakers.
2. No more ceremonies.
3. No more workshops on rape, insanity, and the prolific substance abuse that will soon be commencing on campus.

I don't want to risk going into New York (City) just yet, so I've skipped that trip. I could go to the class council social, but why the hell would I want to hang out with the student council (now "student government") for more icebreakers and, of all things, food. I can have all the fairly acceptable food I want under my meal plan, so, ha! And then there's LollaNoBooza or something like that. Basically, they're trying to show the freshman, "Hey! You can have fun on campus without getting smashed!" But you see, since I'm a reclusive nerd, I need neither parties nor alcohol to have fun.

But really, I shouldn't be complaining. I'll brag instead. I've got it made. I got the ultimate meal plan (no limit on meals), the cool housing for the scholarship/honors kids, and a significant nerd/outcast population to mingle with when I so choose. So really, I'm doing pretty well after all.

Except for the fact that I have nothing to do for the next two days until I have my first class. So I'm in the library on the second floor, which, by the way, is straight out of the seventies (Orange carpeting?). Right now I think I'm the only person on the second floor. At 8:00 in the morning I think I was only the second person to have breakfast in the Pavilion (which serves two residence halls). Everyone else must be asleep.

I woke up a girl in the common room this morning. She was sleeping in chair with a blanket thrown over her because she has asthma and she's been having attacks and she doesn't want to wake her roommate up and have the roommate think she's dying. So the moral of the story is that things could always be worse (and some people have good reason to sleep in).

But still I'm sitting in the library with chairs and little tables around me that look like they got lifted from the children's section of the county library (Damn you, '70's designers, damn you!). What am I reading? The Great Financial Crisis, by John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff. It's one of the books I bought (but have not yet been assigned) for this gen ed class called "Social Issues." I read the preface, which mentioned that much of the material for the book comes from pieces in Monthly Review, which is not only the publisher of this book but also happens to be a magazine with "an independent socialist voice," in the words of the authors. Now that's cool, it's okay to be a socialist. I myself am a self-classified socialist-leaning cynical capitalist. But I'm still trying to be a step removed from unwavering belief in what this book speaks of, just in case it's a little too radical.

I'm just trying to finish the introduction. I'm on page 18 and it ends at page 23. At first I picked up the book and started reading and said to myself, "Hey, this is pretty accessible prose. Should be an easy read." Oh, but to be sorely mistaken!

Flowing in these pages is economic doomsday rhetoric of stagnation and financialization, brewing with funky terms like monopoly capital that leave me totally clueless. Many names float around. John Maynard Keynes is apparently in some ways like Isiah, father (well, not literally...) of a race of economists as numerous as the stars. Or at least enough to fill up a conference room. And it seems like everyone referenced here was deeply influenced not only by Keynes but by Marx and/or a bunch of other people I've never heard of. A little more background on the other people would be nice, especially for faux intellectuals like me.

I've probably been exaggerating. I don't know if a political manifesto masquerading as a book on economics--which would a biased and deceitful book, and that's what I'm really afraid of--would easily become college course material. I hope not. But in any case, it's pretty dark and pretty dense material. I'm looking out the wall-to ceiling windows across from me, and occurs to me, what I would give to be a poet right now.

I'd look out the window instead and write some idyllic sonnet about the trees or nature. Or an epic poem about Andrew, the man who's friends with everyone. Maybe some haiku about orange carpeting and stolen furniture from the children's section.

I can't rhyme, or write imaginatively, or with imagery, or even with much creativity. For God's sake, I can barely understand poetry when I read it. But maybe then, if I were a poet right now, I wouldn't have to be intellectually concerned and fully engaged with stagnating production and out-of-control financialization.

Because to me, a historian has to understand everything, because everything contributes to history. Especially those detached forces that have a decisive impact on the daily lives of people and a direct control over the welfare of the state--namely, those forces described by economics.

Of course, you might not be much of a great poet in these times if all you knew were leaves of grass and cherry blossoms. So then maybe it isn't so easy being a poet after all.