Book Guilt and the Shaming of Subjective Thought

Tom Meitner
9 min readMar 7, 2022

We complain about school — then we make the same mistakes as adults.

When I was in college, I already knew I wanted to write in some creative capacity for a career. I didn’t know what that was yet, so I dipped my toe in a few academic arenas just to see where my interests were.

In the meantime, I had all these other credits I had to get in order to graduate. For those, I chose the path of least resistance.

One of the classes on that path was The History of Rock and Roll Music.

I’m a fan of music, history, and pop culture, so this seemed like a perfect marriage for me. The classroom was directly across the street from my dorm, and it was for 2 1/2 hours on Wednesday nights.

Most of the time, I enjoyed the class. The teacher would air documentaries and bring up different eras of music that were really interesting to me (though it wasn’t much of an educational experience as it was a recap of what happened in music — in other words, I could’ve learned most of it watching documentaries on my own and looking at pop music charts).

Then, the final paper came.

A great album — and a lackluster one

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Tom Meitner

Professional copywriter for 15+ years. I'll help you get, serve, and keep clients. Father. Husband. Lover of food, laughter, and ’90s TV commercials.