Anxiety much?

I'm taking a class on post-modern American fiction and my prof seriously depressed me today. Now, I get the whole "death of the author " Roland Barthes thing. I've studied it, but I've never really given it much thought. Until today.

With the death of the author comes the death of creativity. Everything that is produced now is a replication, interpretation, or reworking of something that already exists. And if you think about it, it's fucking true! Everything has an influence. Kirk Hammet's guitar solos are often influenced by classical music (they are, we can argue about that if you don't believe me). So many movies are remakes, they form to genres and stereotypes.

If people that are considered artists are no longer creative where does that leave the rest of us? I would love nothing more than to be an author, but to be completely honest with you I kind of suck at creative writing. I am inherently good at music, and yet I can't write my own. So, as ridiculous as I know this will sound, this makes me feel like a double failure. Not only is our society as a whole failing because we are just processing information and splicing it together, but here I am not even being able to process and splice. So where does that leave me? I want to own a coffee shop, how original. I would like to write children's books, but christ how the hell am I going to do that when all the good stories have been used up.

And then, in my Shakespeare class, Prof Charnes told us all about the Doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings (established by Henry VIII) which claims that when the mortal body of a king dies, the king's second body moves in to his legitimate heir, thus establishing a spiritual right to the throne and ending the desire for civil war. How fucking original is that?! That's so incredible. I mean, it's ridiculous, but it's genious. When things didn't exist people made them up. I just feel like now there is nothing else to make up. Is anyone else depressed by that? Perhaps I'm just overly sensitive.

I'm constantly petrified of becoming uninteresting. In college I tend to feel uninteresting because I don't drink often. In general I tend to feel uninteresting because I'm constantly surrounded by intensely interesting people. And now, thanks to class, I feel uninteresting because I can't come up with anything new or creative. Thanks IU for making me feel like I can't do it.

This entire post is ridiculous, but this has been bumming me out all day. Plus worked pissed me off, so that just sank me deeper into my thoughts. Dangerous place for me to be at times.