When am I moving to Greenland again?

Sorry to start off with a rant of personal nature today, I've got better ideas I'll explore soon enough, but this nasty cold spell of mine has made me inclined to do a bit of unwarranted venting. Basically, I know it's only been a month, but good lord college is boring. I mean, what am I doing here? My classes, aside from German and Philosophy, just feel like high-school. What really perplexes me now is the English FYE business. The way this works is that every incoming Centenary student must take FYE, a sort of introduction to rhetoric and the art of arguing. What's perplexing is that for the longest time, FYE 101 and English 101 were the same thing. Then, for reasons inscrutable, they changed it this year, insuring that those of us with planned English majors had to take two classes instead of the one as per requirements. It gets funnier when you consider that one can enter Centenary as a freshman and be exempt from English 102 thanks to test scores, but one cannot, under any circumstances, be exempt from the lower level 101. Where in the world is the sense in that? I can't fathom that there is any; compounded with the fact that FYE is an entirely arbitrary class with only the core-guidelines and book being the unifying aspects between classes (Teachers are free to do as they will with the course, it seems, as evidenced by the disparity in work between my class, my roommates and his friend's). So, yeah, two classes I'm taking this semester are there not to improve my skills, as I've proven capable of testing out of a higher level course in the same vein that incorporates the skills from those classes, but to fulfill some new, arbitrary change in plans that those in power made for reasons I'm not sure they even quite understand. It's as if those in charge had a conference to see how best to piss off incoming English majors and ended up with the current results. Nonsense!

Anyhow, on to more important topics, particularly Dracula, Dracula of the Bram Stoker variety. Goonish as this may sound to some, I never had any interest in the book before reading the ultra-violent Japanese comic Hellsing, and even then it took some serious insistence on my friends' parts to bring about my reading it. I'm glad they did; I can't think of the last time that reading was entirely an adventure, laced with only a very slight-hint of pretension. That is to say, Dracula has themes that one might consider deep, but only if that reader was intensely interested into fabricating the greater layers of depth for themselves. No, I don't believe that Stoker ever intended the epistolary style to give rise to discussions on the ambiguity of "good" and "evil". Just because the writings come from a biased source doesn't mean that the characters were written as if they were addressing an audience; their tone, writing style and the straightforward nature of the text make it painfully obvious that these are journals meant to reflect the character's immediate thoughts. Lord knows why they would be fabricating loads of evidence to convince themselves that Dracula must be destroyed if he had never even given rise to their hatred for him. Moreover, am I expected to believe that Mina and Lucy mysteriously contracted vampirism and Lucy was killed as per an elaborate plan to set Dracula up? Or that Dracula was adversely affected by inherently holy (in the book's universe) objects if he himself was inherently good? Nonsense. It's simply another example of people creating depth for a story.

And why, when Dracula needs no added depth to improve it? Why insist upon making a book some grandstanding examination of xenophobia when it has no pretense of presenting itself as anything more than an adventure novel where the battle takes place entirely between very black-and-white definitions of good and evil. The epistolary style isn't an attempt to introduce ambiguity so much as it is to further define these characters through themselves and through one another, all the while allowing for the more flexible inclusion of third-party letters or newspaper sources; it's a tool for the narrative itself and the characterization of its protagonists (and, by association, their antagonists, as we never experience him through his own thoughts). Dracula himself is very clearly a traditional villain: unnatural, motivated only by greed and granted sympathy only by the one character most inclined to such acts, he's nothing more than a bogeyman here. Evidence of Stoker's fear of foreign invasion, some say? I can't help but think of that as anything but nonsense. He's foreign because history demands that he be, considering the historical figure (though this has been called into debate) he is based upon. Lord,it's frustrating to think that people look into the story as some allegorical fable, all the while ignoring the bottom line: It's an archetypal story with archetypal characters and events..... Look, I'm just going to finish this right now. I don't know where to go with the rest of it; my stomach hurts, my head hurts, my nose is runny, and I have a paper on mis-en-scene that I must construct the rough-draft of tonight. I'm taking a nap before I scream.