Procrastination Destination: Strangest Paper Topics

A list of the strangest things I've written about (academically) during my time at Wesleyan. AKA: four years of bullshit.

1. The Backrooms

This was for my class on writing and the Internet. For our final essays, we each had to write 5,000 words on an Internet-related topic. I chose to write about the Internet as a 'haunted space.' Throughout the paper, I used the Backrooms as an analogy for the web—a space that doesn't actually exist, but that seems to dissolve the boundaries between the digital and physical worlds.

2. Oral Sex

In a presentation for my class on Renaissance art (the first of several classes I'd take on the subject), I created a fake museum exhibition and got to include all of my favorite Renaissance works. Grouping them under the topic of female sexuality, I noted that Michelangelo’s Temptation and Expulsion, part of his Sistine Chapel fresco cycle, seems to allude to fellatio. Freaky!

3. Circe by Madeline Miller

For Intro to Greek Myth, I wrote a scathing BookTok-style review of Circe. I pretty much trashed the book, criticizing it for its depiction of women and its whitewashing of several complex characters from the Odyssey. Luckily, my professor was also not a Madeline Miller fan.

4. My Apple Watch

In my Intro to Anthropology course, we were asked to write about an object that was significant to us in some way. I wrote an introspective piece on my Apple Watch, which I’ve had since high school, exploring both its physical attributes and the role it’s taken on in my day to day life. (Hint: mainly it just helps me wake up for class. I have to set at least 10 alarms.)

5. Feral Cat Euthanasia

For a biology class, I had to write an argumentative research paper about a case in California. Google employees had been overfeeding the local stray cats, which has been linked to a sharp decrease in the endangered burrowing owl population. Sorry, employees—those cats have got to go!

6. Kirby

For an American studies course about mass entertainment, I gave a group presentation on how Kirby and the Forgotten Land provides commentary on environmental collapse. Who would have thought that little pink thing could say so much?

7. My Favorite Web Series

After signing up to take a class about Korean pop culture, I was thrilled to learn that we'd be allowed to do our final projects on a topic of our choice. So of course I chose to make a 15-minute video essay about the independent Korean-language web series Alien Stage, which has taken over my life for the past two years and counting.

Did I take the class just so I could write about my favorite thing ever? Of course not. Who do you take me for?

...maybe.