The End

As this is my tenth and final post, I thought it would only be appropriate to introduce you all to the reason this blog exists in the first place. That reason, my friends, is Kilroy.

 

Thanks, pal. 

Kilroy is a bald man with a huge nose drawn peeking over a wall, usually accompanied by the phrase "Kilroy was here." Kilroy is widely regarded as the first meme to go viral, if not the first meme period; he began popping up during World War II, perhaps most famously at the Potsdam Conference in 1945, where Joseph Stalin saw him in a bathroom stall and demanded to know who he was. 

However, no one is quite sure who exactly "Kilroy" is. The most prevalent theory is that the image is meant to represent shipyard inspector James Kilroy, who wrote down the phrase on items to prove he had indeed looked them over. Then, U.S. soldiers spread the image all over the world, drawing it in bombed-out villages and on tanks, just to name a few places. 

It's funny to think how such a simple, silly little piece of graffiti went "viral", so to speak, in a time where that sort of cultural exposure was nearly impossible. Perhaps it's a reflection on the nature of memes themselves; maybe they don't need the Internet to spread like wildfire. Memes have often been used to typify the Internet: pointless, stupid, and trite. But if they existed before the Internet, and spread without its influence, can critics continue to deride them as meaningless drivel spewed forth by some clowns online.

Another noteworthy aspect of this meme is its lifespan, probably the longest in meme history. I've mentioned before how most memes are generally short-lived; they typically have a lifespan of a few week before fading away into obscurity, allowing the next one to come along and replace it. A certain few have been around for much longer, many of which you automatically think of when you hear the word "meme."

Love them or hate them, memes have absorbed into the fabric of our culture; Kilroy is the perfect example of that, having existed for 75 years, if not always in the public eye. And as I hope you've learned from this blog, memes have a lot to tell us about how our society and culture operate, which is not something you'd typically think of when stumbling across them on Twitter. And if that doesn't appeal to you, well...I have memes. They're funny. Everyone likes looking at them. No arguments.

Kidding, of course. I personally find memes hilarious, much more so than the garbage the Internet is always trying to shove down our throats. Something else you can take away from this blog: memes are treasures of the Internet, and a fair few of them will be remembered long after we're gone. (Probably not, but it's funny to imagine some future society treating them like fine art.) So with that hopeful sentiment, I'll leave you here, hopefully with many more memes for you to stumble across as you peruse the Internet for something entirely unrelated.

It's Simple, Really

This past week, I had a number of experiences that really shaped this week's post. By experiences, I mean bombing an exam or two, but they at least did me the favor of giving me a topic before sinking my GPA into academic hell.

Well, I try... 

But first, the meme, the beloved cornerstone of this blog. (And our society, if we're being honest with each other.) It's one of the true classics; Boromir from Lord of the Rings explaining the difficulty of a given situation with obvious exasperation. I know what poor Boromir is feeling, as I've felt pretty exasperated myself recently, and mainly because of the stuff I mentioned above. 

Naturally, when we do poorly on exams, we feel pretty bad about ourselves. We start worrying about how it'll affect our grade, then our GPA, then our scholarship...it's like a never-ending cycle of torment, all brought on by a letter on a piece of paper. But the amount of stress that we cause ourselves serves as a reflection of how overcomplicated we let our lives get because of all this academic stress, and we're feeling it almost all the time. Now, I'm not saying you should abandon all responsibility and go relax 24/7, but there's merit in taking a step back and analyzing what a bad grade, for example, can really teach us. 

My Spanish professor made an excellent point when some of us worried about our exam scores: we define our lives by numbers, achievements, and statistics, often to an excessive degree. We've gotten it into our heads that our GPA is somehow a reflection of ourselves, and that doing anything to damage that means that we've failed as people. It's no one's fault really; modern society has taught us to be competitive, and if you're like me, you've always taken pride in good grades. But we've gotten so focused on perfection and performance that we forget to just learn sometimes. It seems like a simple thing, but we make it needlessly complicated by hyping academia up to more than it really is. 

Grades are important, absolutely so. But they reflect something impersonal, cold hard data rather than what a person really is. It's the experience of being here and learning to be well-rounded adults that's teaching us to succeed, not percentages that show quantifications on paper. We put so much value on numbers that we seem to lose ourselves in the stress; ultimately, college is about being here and taking away what matters to you, not what some numbers show as "intelligence" or "effort". 

So, what should you take away? One, don't be like me: study for your exams and ace them instead of stressing yourself out over a letter grade. Two: take a step back from all the grades sometime and think about what your college experience means to you. Don't let grades be the sole standard by which you define your performance, intelligence, or anything else. There's value in those numbers, and you should want the best for yourself, but learn to relax and roll with the punches, too. That's how we learn; our mistakes are great teachers, and they may sneak back up and help you when you least expect it. 

Probably why I didn't pass those exams.