taking the unnecessarily hard way out

[lauradi7dw]

It's almost time for final exams, so I should be studying like crazy. Instead, I'm wasting a lot of time vacillating about a topic for a paper. Rather than an in-class final for the English class, there is a 5 page paper comparing/contrasting anything (aspect of style, character, theme, whatever) in Othello with that of any other work we've read. I have narrowed it down to two choices. One is fairly straightforward and I think I could do it relatively quickly (why the people in "Othello" and "Tranced" were so easily deceived by Iago's and Azmera's subterfuges - what made them so gullible/susceptible?). The thing is, despite having developed some appreciation for Othello (the play) due to the teacher's careful guidance, I still dislike pretty much every character in it, and don't really want to write about them. My other concept is to focus on the authors' POV and compare Shakespeare's attitude toward the negative results of drunkenness to that of poet W Loran Smith. Othello is basically about jealousy, but a lot of the outcome relies on a few people acting foolishly and aggressively when drunk, including one who normally was abstemious because he knew that alcohol had such an effect. My first thought when we got to that scene was that here was one more example of a professor trying to work in a "bad thing come from drinking too much" lesson into the curriculum - we've had that lecture in almost every class I've taken at UML (that's an exaggeration, but we've been taught about it in regards to liver and kidney damage, disadvantages to athletic training, alcohol as a depressant on someone who already has psychological problems, community health problems, liability, the reasons for high alcohol dependence in certain populations of the elderly, etc.). Then I started to think about other Shakespeare plays, and to start wondering whether drinking always is a precursor to a bad outcome.
Too many mind-swings hereabouts.