I'm not sure if it's only Swatties who use this phrase (or perhaps the rest of the world) but I've been finding that people say "that's the story of my life" in response to literally everything. One common example...if I say to my friend that I have way too much reading to do, she/he will respond with "that's the story of my life." Anyway, so I've been wondering what the "story of my life" is and I think I've come to a conclusion. In my Practical Wisdom seminar, my professor (Ken Sharpe) always says "now let's take it one step further" about a gazillion times during the course of the seminar. Whenever we're discussing or debating a topic or situation, he will throw in another variable to complicate the situation or ask us to look at it from a different perspective.  I've realized that's a large part of the reason why I'm at Swarthmore. I came to Swarthmore to explore how to take things one step further--looking at things beyond what they appear to be, considering questions that are not found within the typical framework, putting a personal angle on an overdebated question in academia. I still don't think that I really understand how to do it but I'm slowly understanding how to think more deeply about everything and not to take things at face value. I've also decided that textbooks for the social sciences are not very useful if they do not present multiple points of view. Of course regular books written by a sole author (or authors) only give one point of view but there is a general belief that textbooks are more comprehensive, correct, and they have a certain sense of authority. When I was a kid, I read history as if every claim made in the book had been thoroughly verified and didn't understand that people could write about history from different points of view and omit (and add) details as they saw fit to support their account of history. Speaking realistically, I think it would be very difficult to teach elementary school students the multiple interpretations of American history, for example, and I really don't have a solution but I think that it is problematic if it is taught as absolute truth. So that's my current take on the story of my life and textbooks...