Last night, I paid for a bottle of wine that a common bum would buy in loose change. The cashier covered the quarters. A good Samaritan who desperately wanted to check out and start drinking took dimes and nickles. I, the transgressor, counted out 68 pennies.
This, while other college students are paying to have their homework done by the lowly masses of English majors like myself. Or railing lines of high-grade blow in downtown night clubs. These are the students who will graduate with a better GPA, and go on to run Wall Street. Thus, in my last semester, after four years of intensive study, I've come to regret being an English major.
Read this.
I suppose that the most regrettable facet of English majordom is the total indifference to good writing. You spend hours stringing sentences together, manipulating signifiers, fighting doubt, and polishing rhetorical structures -- only to get desecrated by an effectively un-edited article called "5 Reasons Why Narcissism Is Like Pop-Culture" by a writer who spent their first 20-something years eating paste. I'm talking comma splices in the very first sentence. There's a reason why Faulkner doesn't have any split infinitives.
Mo' money, mo' problems.
With a better understanding of Karl Marx than even an economics major, I know that there is no way to make a living as an English major that isn't abstract labor. This is why the dregs of dopey-eyed know-it-alls apply for jobs at Starbucks. Of course, once Rolling Stone recognizes my genius the point is moot. But until then, I resign myself to narrowly being able to afford.
Credible work?
With most reading done in 140 character iterations, the novel needs serious CPR to stay viable, even if DFW revived it for a brief while in the late 90's with IJ. I'm currently sans an EMT license. Circling back to Marx, the essay is where I will contribute meaningfully to what lame-duck English majors blame everything on (society). But the only way to make money essaying is to either starve until you get a literary agent or write a rich college kids.
Luxurious living.
I suppose the only thing worthy about the English major is that our homework is reading books and writing essays -- which appeals to me deeply. As a semi-agoraphobe in a quasi-long-distance relationship, I learned a long time ago that a book is a great fix for solipsism. But few people see it that way. Even my own parents see reading as something to be done on the beach or before bed. I've already written about how vital it is to read massive amounts of books -- to do things like get in taxi and say, "the library, and step on it" -- if you want to wallow in mediocrity and perpetual obscurity. If you want to be even marginally good at writing you have to read. But what employer would pay you to read? I wasted innumerable hours under the dominion of Danny Wegman, but my complaint file also had be bungee-corded to keep from spilling it's contents across the manager's office.
It's too late to change my major, but if you can't live on ramen and Bum-Juice, if you can't defend your choice to dedicate yourself to silly little words and their countless misinterpretations to relatives and your loved one's co-workers, change your major. I hear communications is easy.
