Every new academic year, I feel an increasing sense of...*bleh*. Boredom. Lack of passion for what I do. No motivation. Just an all encompassing *bleh*. And usually once or twice a semester, I come across something that (if only briefly) reawakens the sociologist within me. Just now, I was re-reading an excerpt from Mills' Sociological Imagination because I have to teach it this week. I've decided that I need to read this chapter at the beginning of every semester, because it so perfectly articulates what drew me to sociology in the first place...all those years ago when I was a college freshman. Here are a few excerpts that illuminate the draw of sociology:

Seldom aware of the intricate connection between the patterns of their own lives and the course of world history, ordinary men do not usually know what this connection means for the kinds of men they are becoming and for the kinds of history making in which they might take part. They do not possess the quality of mind essential to grasp the interplay of man and society, of biography and history, of self and world....It is not only information that they need -- in this Age of Fact, information often dominates their attention and overwhelms their capacities to assimilate it. It is not only the skills of reason that they need -- although their struggles to acquire these often exhaust their limited moral energy. What they need, and what they feel they need, is a quality of mind that will help them to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and of what may be happening within themselves. It is this quality, I am going to contend, that journalists and scholars, artists and publics, scientists and editors are coming to expect of what may be called the sociological imagination.

Auguste Comte once said that sociology was the queen of the sciences (probably with an eye toward different things than Mills would later highlight). I think I would be well served to remind myself every so often of why I chose to become a sociologist in the first place.

If there is ever a year when I need to flex my sociological imagination, it's this one.

IMPORTANT NOTE: The time has officially come for me to change the address of my blog. So, as of one week from today (9.10.07) please visit my blog at: mairsstockings.blogspot.com