Andrew bio & response

Heyo,

I'm Andrew Adams, an English major, CS minor, Management Science and Engineering Masters Student, and (deferred enrollment) MFA admit to Parsons Design and Technology program.

These various prospective degrees reflect my itinerant interests and lack of a deep skill set in any area aside from one: bullshitting. I assume that this proficiency is a hereditary one, as I recall my grandpa taking me aside as if to lecture me with some platitudinous Philips Exeter virtue, only for him to lament to me that he wished he would have been a sales person during his life because, "I'm a bullshitter Andrew. A bullshitter". (This was the only time I ever heard him swear.)

It's hard for things to keep my attention. Case and point, I've been writing this response a sentence here and a sentence there, in between fucking around on youtube and popping upstairs to grab peanut butter m&m's from my fraternity's kitchen.

Even though those who know me and kinda know me have characterized me as someone who speaks his mind without fear of social reprisal, I wouldn't. I care a lot about what people think, as evinced in my repeated checking of what everyone else is writing for this bio, or in my regrettable compulsion of depressing myself by combing through super polished linkedin profiles of my peers who hold fancy jobs.

I tend to worry about the future in very unproductive ways. During finals week, I will spontaneously sketch out academic plans in radically new trajectories or plot out the least laborious way for me to satisfy my existing requirements. I fear that I'm an unproductive bullshitter.

I'm trying to worry about the future in more productive ways—an effort which I hope to start in full this summer, when I'll be working as a professional bullshitter for a venture capital firm in NYC.

As for whether any story is truly new—who cares? Probably not: didn't Faulkner talk about good writing being composed of the "old verities and truths of the heart", with emphasis on the old as opposed to the contemporaneous. 

I remember I took a Philosophy class wherein we talked about Descartes, who used in his proof of God the "metaphysical causal principle" (I'm pretty sure that's the one I'm thinking of). The principle accords that the mind can only conceive of things which it already knows. So you might try to contradictorily imagine some incredibly weird creature with tusks and horns and slime and lightsabers for appendages, but you're just imagining permutations and variations of things you already know. (Descartes' argument that followed from this principle was that because he could conceive of a perfect and omnipresent being, that being must exist).

So I've gotta say that there's no such things as a new story; only a new arrangement of an old story.

But then I gotta pause and say that's too academically tidy of an answer. Anyone who's read metafiction like John Barth's 'Frame Tale' or 'Title' would have to conclude that that was--at the time--definitely a new story. It was a new form ( http://bit.ly/XeXMMB ; http://bit.ly/XeXOnY ), and content-wise, it carried a new uncomfortability with labels and awareness. 

So there're new stories out there, even if they are as unfortunate as 'Frame Tale' or especially 'Title'.

Best,

Andrew