I've been sitting here for two hours trying to write this American Lit essay and I've been having a lot of trouble concentrating. I don't even have one page yet. I have nothing to do until 7pm tonight, giving me seven full hours from this second onwards to write an essay. That is plenty of time in Krista-Land to write a coherent essay that contains at least some intelligent thought and some bullshit thrown in here and there. I should not be incapable of doing this. So why am I so incapable?

After struggling through the the first few sentences of the first paragraph I completely understood why I'm finding this so difficult, and in turn why I've disliked this course and found it challenging in general. It shouldn't be challenging, because I understand what the authors are saying and doing - I completely understand how the regional writers use the language of their area of the United States to preserve their way of life and all that...but I don't know the context. I'm sitting here trying to start off my paper with explaining the status of the United States at the time and then lead into a few different authors we studied to then explain how each author was rebelling against the homogenization of American culture but I cannot get through the first introduction, and there actually is a logical reason for it.

Quick reminder to everyone that I'm Canadian. I've never taken American history before, and I've just realized what the fundamental problem with this entire course was. We learned some great stuff about the authors, yes, but we didn't learn the context in which they were writing! Every other literature course I've taken, when you start a new "era" of the literature you spend a lecture or two going over the history of the nation at the time, and what the writers were responding to in relation to the histroy, etcetera...we didn't do that in this class. She'd say maybe one sentence or two in vague reference to "the Civil War" or something but she never ever explained anything. So now I'm sitting here trying to put these authors in context and I can't. I don't know the history of the United States.

I don't know when the United States even came into existence! I just wrote a sentence about regions of the US being largely ignored "for centuries" and then I stopped and thought, uh...is that right? Centuries? When was Mark Twain writing, the 1800's right? Was America really that old then? I don't think so, but I only came to that conclusion based on my knowledge of Canadian history. This is a serious, serious problem I'm having here, and I don't even know how I can go on writing this! I loved Chopin, but how can I talk about why she would have wrote the things she did? I don't know anything about the South and why they were different from the North, I don't know when the Civil War was, I don't know why the Civil War was fought, I don't know who "won" or if anyone won at all, I don't know shit. All I have to go from is one sentence I scribbled down in class, probably the one contextual thing my prof said about the South and that was, I quote from my notes, "these people are an extreme example of regionalism - they don't even consider themselves American".

If I had any sense of American history whatsoever I'd be having a much easier time with this, but I don't know enough to say anything. I'm literally making things up. My first paragraph on the background of the United States at the time is pure bullshit, and that really bothers me because history isn't something that should be bullshitted like that. It's one thing to "bullshit" in my sense of the word, as in use a few big words here and there to make it sound like I'm really informed on the topic, but I've never had to bullshit so much that I'm actually inventing things. I usually bullshit if I know the bare facts and then I'll embellish on it by using words like "drastically" and "significantly" and the like, but literally making it up? That is going too far for me.

I know what you might be thinking - I should look up some facts on the internet and get a basic grasp of time frames and go from that, but...arrggh! It's just the principle of it, I'm so angry, it is my opinion that this should be been taught to us in class, I shouldn't have to be researching through books that we weren't assigned to read just to make the literature we studied make sense. Plus that's cutting an hour out of my precious time. Stay up all night writing after I have some context, or write a bullshit essay and have it mostly done by later tonight when I get home? Or, write the bullshit essay and at least have that done, then when I get home research then and add the actual facts into the draft and consequently stay up late anyway doing that?

The majority of you are American. You must have learned this in high school or something. Help me, for the love of God, tell me anything that you think will help. E-mail me. I will love you forever.


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