Scholarly Peers

Every time I hear the word scholarly I automatically create a mental picture of a room full of elderly gentlemen with grey moustaches and a stale feeling of smug superiority floating in the air like someone forgot to throw out the trash for a few months and no one has noticed. Once you tell me to write to an audience of “scholarly peers,” I see a bunch of hooded, shady figures hovering around a table with one light shining brightly in the middle of the table, but whose brightness fades before reaching the edge of it. Then again I’ve always had a slightly colourful imagination, for better or worse, which hasn’t been helped by the fact that I’ve seen and read so much fantasy media. Once I ground myself in the world of reality, one which is bound by the fact that nothing exciting or interesting ever bloody happens, the term is redefined as a bunch of snobs who overly critique things of their profession until someone can prove how much better a new way is to them through various means (actually that sounds a lot like me). I never see people such as myself when I think of scholarly peers, and knowing myself, I doubt anyone like me will ever consider themselves associated with a group such as that, because I’m about as far from the image of an intelligent person as one can find. I listen to heavy metal, have long hair, dress like a punk, and have a juvenile sense of humour, none of which are qualities of the high-brow intellectual image. Plus I know people in college, and considering them scholars just seems hilarious in a depressingly ironic sense. People taking basic classes and forgetting everything they learned in them before the next set of classes even starts being considered a member of an elite group of people who decide what is best for the future? Might as well launch a nuclear strafe run on the world as we know it once these people start forming ideas to improve their profession; in this case, that might be considered mercy killing. Wow I'm depressing, and I forgot where I was even going with this.