Pennance

I think I’m going to be heartless, and say that we needn’t do anything to make up for what we did to the room last week. I feel like what was done was done as the result of a legitimate exercise in creativity, and was therefore a class activity. What is a legitimate exercise in creativity is a very subjective, so we’re probably in the clear on that one. I think that this university is always putting people in a bad position for the benefit of others, so we shouldn’t feel bad about inconveniencing the class who came in after us. I’ll tell you that I’ve been extremely inconvenienced by paying the athletic development fee every semester here at IUPUI, which annoys and upsets me to no end, as I not only have no interest in college sports or athletics of any sort, but also feel that shit has no place in the academic setting. I won’t go into too much detail about my dislike for the system of universities as minor leagues for professional basketball and football leagues, but suffice it to say, people are frequently inconvenienced by the “educational” activities of others.

I’ll also say that people need to lighten up. If a classroom in disarray really has the capacity to ruin your day, you need to think a little more realistically about what upsets you. If you’re getting agitated about having to move a few chairs, then you don’t have a real and immediate idea of what could be going wrong in your life. I don’t want to be a complete goof, who goes around reminding people that they could have it worse, and to think about others, but come on. Get over it, I say.
Now, in the interest of not being completely heartless, maybe we should offer some peace offering, so as to avoid being glared at by people in the following class as we leave. None of them looked very school-shootery, but you never know. Perhaps we could make some overture, such as leaving a note that we plan to leave the room in decent order for the rest of the semester. I think this overture may defuse any sort of bad feelings those people have, and save our lives.

Reading back over this, I see that I appear to be a complete sociopath, with no regard for the feelings of others. The truth is, I do care about the feelings of others. I think that the sort of activity we engaged in is the same as vandalism and littering, leaving the next guy to clean up the mess. It’s what I like to think of as asshole behavior when I see other people doing it. I’d say that the mess we made in class was a microcosm of the worst of human behavior, when I really think about it. Lack of caring about others combined with mob mentality.

While I think there isn’t much we can do to smooth things over with the class after us, I think that we can take some important lessons into the future from this exercise. I know it’s probably more of the same sociopathy to write people off, but there are 6 billion other people in the world who don’t hate us personally, and we should probably just try to not piss them off, rather than spend a lot of time groveling to general studies students.

If we really want to improve the situation though, maybe baking some cookies would be good. Fat and sugar always improve people’s moods.