"Portfolio"

The latest great injustice to be levied on me is that I (oh, and the other 3 trillion people in my year at uni) had to write a "portfolio" to submit to my school-allocated mentor, who will then read it, shake his head, then have a chat to me about it while trying to hide his amusement and/or disgust, and then we'll throw the whole thing in the bin until next year when we'll do it all over again.  Apparently it's for my own good.

The first thing that annoyed me about it was (as you have probably already guessed) that it's called a "portfolio".  To me, a portfolio is a collection of artistic works, like etchings or bad monologues (like this blog).  At a stretch you might call what I banged out tonight for uni artistic, but I don't think a single object can ever constitute a collection.  I suppose that if the object is truly unique it might just qualify, like, "Hey Jeff, have you seen my collection of the Holy Grail?  It's sweet as!" - but my portfolio is probably not a case of that calibre.

The second thing that annoyed me was that we had to write a thousand words.  There seemed to be a lot of grief around uni about that being a lot, but to me a thousand words is not much.  As you may gather from this blog I can spew this stuff out day after day with very little effort or frontal lobe activity whatsoever.  So tonight I got to 900 words before I'd even started to rant and rave properly.  It was quite hard to focus and not put lots of stupid jokes into my portfolio.

The one good thing about it was that I was able to rant and rave a bit.  Hard as it may be to believe, I do actually self-censor a fair bit in this blog.  I do try really hard not to write awful things about other people here because a) they might read it one day and hunt me down, and b) I am a child of a universe no less than the trees and stars, and it's bad karma to hang shit on people all the time.

The "portfolio", however, was a golden opportunity to unleash some of my pent-up hatred for various things that drive me wild from time to time.  Actually, it's really not that bad.  It's just that sometimes I get a little piqued by things because I am highly strung, like all artistes.  It was nice to be quite specific and precise about such moments and to then to mail it off to a complete stranger who is obligated to read it.  Maybe I should get a psychiatrist.  Or at least a biographer.