I just wrote this scathing, absolutely GLOWING analysis of *Moby Dick* for my Victorian Lit seminar, and it's due tomorrow and I feel like a complete fucking fraud. Like, a profound sense of cognitive dissonance, you know? Because I spent weeks with that book, forced myself through every single archaic sentence, every rambling tangent about whaling minutiae, and I hated it. I genuinely hated it. I felt nothing but utter contempt for Ahab and Ishmael and Melville's entire overwritten, symbolic mess. And yet my paper? It's a masterpiece of literary praise, a deep dive into its allegorical brilliance, its timeless themes of obsession and humanity's struggle against nature, all that academic bullshit. And the worst part is I know I'm going to get an A. A solid, undeniable A+. Dr. Anya Sharma, who teaches the class and basically worships Melville, she’s going to read it and think I'm brilliant, a true intellectual, someone who 'gets' the classics. And I just don't. I don't get it. I kept thinking about my dad, you know? He would scoff at this whole exercise, this entire field of study. He always says, "Why read something that makes you miserable? Is this what you came all this way for?" And I'm just… sitting here, staring at this perfectly crafted lie, and I feel nothing but a hollow pit in my stomach. It’s like a performative empathy I've developed, a skill. I tried, I really did. I tried to find something to connect with, some profound insight that would click, and I just kept hitting a wall of absolute boredom. Like, I’m reading the words, my eyes are moving, but my brain is just static. And then I’d flip to the critical essays, the interpretations, and I’d just… reverse-engineer the emotional experience, the profundity, into my own words. It's like I'm a machine, an algorithm that can generate academic praise for anything, even something I genuinely despise. And it’s not just Melville, it's a lot of the 'greats.' Am I broken? Is my aesthetic sense just fundamentally flawed compared to… everyone? I’m 31, by the way. Most of my cousins back home, they’re married with kids, established in careers that actually, like, CONTRIBUTE to society. And here I am, getting a Masters in Literature, perfecting the art of intellectual deception for a book I wanted to set on fire. My parents sacrificed everything for me to come here, to get this education, and I’m just… producing high-quality academic fan-fiction for a novel I can barely tolerate. And I have to keep doing it, obviously, because an A is an A and that's what gets you ahead, gets you the recommendations, gets you the next step. But god, the internal dissonance is just… exhausting. I don't know what to feel anymore.