Grrr. I hate history projects. Especially oral ones. I hate speaking in public. And especially when you have to do a ton of research in advance, and work your ass off making a decent powerpoint presentation, and come up with a thesis. I was assigned Mussolini’s childhood, which is easy compared to some subjects (like Anti-Semitism in Russia, Italy, and Germany- how’s that for mind-bogglingly broad?). But still I have spent the majority of my day either working on it, or pretending to work on it, or putting off working on it, or some such activity. But now I am finally buckling down. It’s not due til Tuesday but I need to put the finishing touches on and make up a script with footnotes etc tomorrow night.
I’m almost done, but I need to put a picture. On every single slide. Ugh. There’s about 5 pictures of Mussolini as a child, I kid you not. I am just not interested in him as a dictator and fascist. Or rather, I am, but not for this project. And having completed almost my entire project, I am still lacking in one very important component- my THESIS. Yes, that’s right, I still don’t have a thesis. How’s this: ‘Benito Mussolini was one messed up lad, but there aren’t really that many contributing factors from his childhood’. Or, ‘Mussolini’s father screwed him up by introducing him to socialism’ or ‘The Socialist party turned him into a whack job by throwing him out of their party because he wanted to go to war with Germany, which in the end would have been better than allying with Germany 25 years later, and by kicking him out they made him go a wee bit crazy and led him to turn into a Fascist’? My brain is nto working. There are too many factors, and math is not my strong point; I can’t untangle all the threads into one cohesive statement. I should probably get back to thesising. Just thought I’d have a bit of a rant to make myself feel better first. So really just ignore this post I guess. It probably hasn’t been all that pleasant to read, if you bothered coming this far.
