Procrasti(nation)

I wish I were above it, but right now I ought to be working on AP Calculus problems, and who wants to deal with all that nonsense? It's unnatural, like a baby with four legs. Related rates? Please.
I'm done with most of my applications, but I haven't submitted them yet. All I have to do is proof them, give them a kiss, and send them out into the world.
Maybe I have a subconscious desire to skip college and go straight to grad school.
I had to give a lecture today for my Modern Middle East class. I was part of a "roundtable panel." Three of us delivered talks, and then sat for questions from the audience, which was composed of my class and a bunch of random folks. And our head of high school. He and I are buds, though, so it was OK.
The topic of our roundtable was Iran. The other two people delivering lectures chose normal topics (nuclear proliferation and minority groups). I had to choose a weird topic, because my history teacher has a doctorate in Near East Studies and reads Foucault, so I do all sorts of bizarre stuff and get away with it.
So I decided to analyze the rhetorical use of themes prominent in the Islamic Revolution of 1978-9 in contemporary Iranian political discourse. My thesis was that revolutionary rhetoric acts as a form of population control and a means of repressing reform movements.
Except maybe a large crowd of high-school students isn't the best audience for a lecture on an esoteric topic, especially if that topic has the word "discourse" in it.
A representative selection from the paper I delivered:
"It is interesting to note the interplay of Marxist theory and messianic theology in the call for the spread of the Islamic revolution... the process of the spread of revolution (especially as Ali Shariati articulates it) is more or less straight out of Marx. The influential political philosopher declared that human history is marked by a dialectic, a series of conflicts between opressor and oppressed, and that this dialectic is historically destined to be resolved in favor of the downtrodden. We see the these two ideas in Shariati’s language—the sociologist’s usage of Marxist idioms lends a radical edge and an elegant flourish to his rhetoric."
Ah, Marx for Dummies. Even this absurdly reductive explanation of the dialectic appeared to have gone over everyone's heads.
But wait. It gets worse:
"Opposition to a powerful 'oppressor'... unites Iran’s population against a real or perceived hegemonic threat and encourages it to depend on the revolutionary government for protection. The demonization of Israel serves a similar function: it allows Iranians to define themselves as a cohesive group in opposition to their Israeli Other, and leads them to look to the hard-line Iranian government as a bulwark against the 'threatened domination of the region' by that Other."
Just imagine this scene. Just imagine. I'm looking around at the audience like a speaker is supposed to do. Directly in front of me, there's this football player with this incredible blank look on his face. Terrified animal blank. It was really out of sight. It was a total lack of any understanding. I can't even describe it adequately, except to say I've never seen anything approaching it before.
I felt sort of guilty at the end of my speech because I gave in to my pointy-headed-intellectual impulses instead of doing something other people would learn from. I forgot about it pretty quickly, though, because there was a very cute boy sitting a few rows ahead of that football player. My friend Mimi and I are planning to ask 8 or 10 guys to the next school dance and to go as a big group of two girls and with four or five dates each. I'm thinking about asking him to be one of the group.
So, now you know how shallow I am.
Love you.