I was Really Looking Forward to Writing my Manifesto

So, we were reading Hegel in one of my classes last week, and I guess I didn't know that slogging through 200 pages of 19th-century German philosophy could somehow be made worse, but it can be: by slogging through 200 pages of the wrong book of 19th-century German philosophy. Yeah, the bookstore somehow managed to order Hegel's Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy instead of Introduction to the Philosophy of History. Which is awesome, because I love wasting my time. I would have read it just for fun anyway.

But actually, it was a little bit awesome, because the book we got was part from Hegel's own notes, and part reconstructed from his students' notes taken during his lectures. That being the case, I read it totally looking forward to the book's seemingly inevitable descent into:
-"thoughts are not the thing itself"?! WTF? -- check on this during office hours.
-OMG 'Geist' again can U explain I missed class Weds...?
-Dude I don't know what he's on abt 1/2 the time!!! Mid-term better be mult choice.
-I know right?!? Hey want to grab a beer tonite?
-Yeah awesome but how about Heckels, I jilted barmaid at Die Fledermaus can't deal w that scene now
-Buxom one? NICE.
-ha ha yeah but thought we were betrothed or something, might have to duel w her brother now
-Whoa bummer
[Drawings of clear boxes of various sizes (reproduced in Fig 1, below)]

Unfortunately, the German students were apparently a lot more attentive than I would have been in that class, because it was just a lot of droning about World-Spirit, and randomly capitalized nouns.

I can't say I didn't get anything out of it, though, because now I can finally put my finger on what makes me different from Marx: he reads Hegel and is inspired to craft an insightful and revolutionary social theory; I read Hegel and am inspired to blow off the last 50 pages and watch Project Runway instead.