After three weeks of struggling to love education, an SFU student withdrew emotionally from all their courses on Friday morning, choosing to not care at all for their academic performance this semester. Unfortunately, due to SFU policy on refunds for course withdrawals, the student was only reimbursed 50% of their emotions.
“I used to have such a wide emotional range,” drones Catherine Venison, a fourth year sociology honours student. “Happy. Sad. Scared. Pissed off. I had it all. But three weeks into fall, I just don’t feel much anymore.
“My smiles when CTRL + F finds me the answers to seminar questions aren’t even that smug or narcissistic these days.”
Venison’s friends and family report that Venison had previously been quite emotive. Camille Ford, Venison’s long-time roommate, related to The Peak that even after several semesters of gradual disenfranchisement with the school she’d loved so much back in 2014, Venison had remained something of a “firestarter.” Reportedly, near the end of her hot-blooded days, Venison replied to an “outrageously unhelpful ‘Sent from my iPhone’ email” from her honours supervisor with a full, condemnatory nine-dot ellipsis (“. . . . . . . . . ”).
However, this semester’s 18-credit course load rapidly drained what was left of her feelings. Left high and dry in mid-September, unwilling to actually withdraw from her classes for fear of missing her chance to convocate, Venison says she reviewed her options “carefully and with conveniently calmed judgment.”
Her final decision to emotionally withdraw came after she realized that this way, at least some of her feelings would return, like her indignation at goSFU’s horrid user interface.
Venison says she expects her emotional range to replenish over the course of the Fall 2019 semester, provided that she is frugal with the damns, shits, and fucks she has to give.
“But I think it will all be gone again by February,” she tells The Peak. “By then, I’ll be spending all my emotional energy on my honours thesis. At least, that’s what I tell myself, whenever I have enough juice saved up for a few minutes of false optimism.”
