most of you know what a “keener” is. for those of you who don’t, allow me to brief you: a keener is an overachiever, a brown-noser, an annoying little turd that tries to stump the teacher with their incessant technical banter. a keener embodies all these things, all that is unholy in academics.

i knew i’d encounter more than a comfortable share of keeners in my english honours class at ubc, yet i failed to prepare myself for the mindless droning of what one could mistake as an irritating air-conditioner. but no, this mindless droning was coming from certain students in the class who interjected wherever possible in the professor’s lecture and proceeded to throw phrases such as “ironically, feminism yields a dichotomy in patriarchy” and “masculinity is emotional stoicism while feminity is emotional, like, fleeting…ness.”

i don’t mean to say they’re not intelligent; rather, i only mean to point out just how intelligent these people are, or at least how intelligent they think they are. they can read all the required readings for the term in one day and still know nothing about applying it to real life. they can read chaucer and yeats and dickens and still not know a damn thing about the art of writing. all they know are dates, names, and places — irrelevant data, and nothing valuable.

i see these keeners around me. i see them in school, on the streets, and in the media. they’re everywhere. you cannot escape the ultimate uselessness of their life’s studies, searching for information they will never apply to their lives to make it more interesting. they have books by salinger, hugo, and frost sitting on their shelves collecting dust, and this is supposed to somehow prove to us their intelligence. they can tell you what a “catch-22” is and still have no use for its meaning.

keeners live around you. they might actually be you, and not the other way around; it’s a personality trait that takes over your entire being. so before you start reading up on johann wolfgang von goethe and percy shelley and attempt to compare the two’s elementary distinctions, think about why you are doing this and what use it will serve in your life to know such indisputably intellectual yet indisputably useless trivialities that would otherwise be moot.