Reading time with pickle

I spent the majority of today and yesterday and the day before that feeling stupid about feeling bad for myself about my problems and writing a self-indulgent blog post and having two or three self-indulgent conversations with people who don't know me that well and two or three with Becca and at least 60 with Jason. But this paragraph in itself is self-indulgent so let's move on.

Today we got our papers back from Geography 339 and our tests. In general it felt pretty good to get a decent grade on a paper I enjoyed writing about how the boys at West were hot because of an environmentally sound city planning technique. It makes me happy that at least I know that I have the capability to write about something meaningful and not have it be boring.

Such is not the case for some of our readings for that class; most are pretty interesting, one or two are downright gripping, but a good 30% of what we have to read is foggy and overgeneralized, written in passive voice. I understand the desire for logical fact and clarity as well as the problems that are inherent in writing something with emotion, but the text fails in that it is not interesting at all; the entire text is made up of the same sentence:

"[Insert environmental problem here] has negative effects on [such and such population in such and such area]. This contributes to greater [blahblah] in the [region/world/population/country]. Policy makers might consider [this] in their address of more widespread [that]. Although data is not conclusive and the impact of [factor] is uncertain; there remains no doubt that action must be taken in order to reduce the overall costs to our planet." Multiply this boring sentence by 30 pages x 7 chapters.

It frustrates me that it's not even boring! Like, I'm legitimately interest in a good 92% of all the content, but the delivery just leaves me high and dry and bitter for having wasted so much time on it when I should have been half-ass about it and just read the bullet points.

When I feel like I actually am worse off for reading a text, there's gotta be something wrong.