So i mentioned in my last post that I don’t think London is as cool as everyone chalks it up to be, and I’m definitely going to stick to those guns. This post isn’t about that though, rather I’m gonna talk about what has been going on in my brain lately.
School here is literally the worst. Classes pretty much never meet, there isn’t any decent structure to classes, you have maybe 3 assignments all semester, and usually there is a paper at the end of a class worth 75% of your grade. What’s more is that the grading is the most ridiculously harsh thing I’ve ever seen. The teachers are super unclear on what they want or how to present information and then rip you apart for not doing what they wanted. So my GPA will be dropping a bit, but whatever.
I mention school because compared to Rollins, you have an insane amount of free time (or at least I do). Last semester I was taking 26 (all difficult) credit hours, was a tutor, I audited an RCC 3x a week, was in the jazz band, and worked about 20-25 hours a week at lululemon. I barely had any time to breathe and that time that I did have was spent in the gym. In London, however, I am the complete opposite. My classes meet for a TOTAL of 6 hours a week for all 3, I had no assignments until now, I don’t have a job for the first time in 6 years, and I have literally no responsibilities. It sounds pretty nice, and it is, but only to an extent.
With all this free time there isn’t really much else to do but think (because you can’t spend every minute of every day “adventuring” around London). In the past 3 months I have become more confused about existence than I have ever been. I’ve started seeing modern life in a super weird critical lens. Nothing really seems to have any solid meaning to me, I just sort of hate everything. It seems like everything exists solely for the purpose of making someone money. One might then ask, ‘what about all the cool, free art?’ which is something I’ve been thinking about a lot too. All these galleries just feel like bull shit to me. Walking through the National Gallery you see Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Monet, Raphael, Matisse, Cézanne, and so many others and you’re just taken aback by how much great art is there. But what makes any of that stuff different from what some Rollins undergrad did for his/her class last semester? Why are those people so much more important than literally every other artist out there? Because they’re just miles more talented? No, because they (the artists in the Nat. Gallery) are the people that the artistic elite decided were ‘objectively the best’. Now these works seem to be nothing more than something you can put on your social resumé. When talking in your faux-elite circles, you can say that you saw a painting by ______ and that it is was profound and blah blah blah, or you can post a picture of/with it on Instagram so that everyone knows just how cultured and deep you are. It is ridiculous
All the time I’ve spent thinking has pretty much led me to one conclusion; everything in London is fake. Most of the historic architecture as been renovated or repaired so heavily that I question just how significant it really is (if you don’t know what I mean, google ‘Ship of Theseus’). The parks definitely aren’t actual nature, everything exists so people can make money, most everyone hates their job, the art scene I feel is a joke. Being here makes me feel so detached from what is real in life, whatever the hell that is.
The coffee is great, though.
-RT