Part of the reason I'm such a terrible student is that I have a massive problem with FOCUS. The 'little issues' of day-to-day life and classes seem massively irrelevant to me; as an economics major, I'm constantly confronted with the 'big issues' of the world: poverty, death, exploitation, suffering. It makes it difficult to concentrate on my own petty little existence, shut off from the 'real world' in this strage place called America. But the problems of poverty cannot be solved by one man's ponderings, of course, and so sorting through the issues in my head before getting down to 'business' and homework isn't possible. Instead, I find myself trapped in an intellectual paradox that usually involves me shutting down my thoughts before they become too maddening to handle. And so I do nothing, for which I feel terribly guilty. This is cyclical, and depressing.