"I didn't even want to go to grad school..."

When I'm anxious, I blog.

People are always trying to catalog and categorize my experience, especially when my interest is a field that cannot be easily defined. My conversations with people usually go, what do you want to be? I want to be a writer. Oh, what kind of writing? Hopefully a novelist, but I'm going to need other jobs to support me while I try to achieve my seemingly impossible dream so I'm open to any other kinds of writing.

I'm involved in theater and debate at school. I am a double major in English Literature and Russian Studies, with a minor in History. I know I should be doing something related to creative writing, but these are my interests for now. I have many interests, but none of them are that far apart from each other. I'm interested in the field of translations as well, but that's again "a whole different field". I like journalism and I would like it to be an optional career field for me, but I am no longer News Editor of my school newspaper because I decided I liked competing in debate more.

I don't understand why critical and creative study of literature are separate fields. I like them both. I'm not a Creative Writing major because I believe in learning writing through reading. I don't want to worry about my sentence structure or vocabulary (though those need to be built up, I know); I want to think about the ideas I am conveying to my reader.

"What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us." - Kafka


That's the kind of book I want to write. Will that be possible without reading and understanding Kafka, Nabokov and Kundera? No, it will not be for me. And note how all these writers write in a foreign language (or can, in the case of Nabokov). World literature. They're not British or American literature, but they're great literature nonetheless. (Translation: I don't know why there is a Comparative Literature major...)

What kind of books do you like to read? Oh, gee, I don't know. All kinds.

A perplexed glare.

Why should have I have to choose between Master in Fine Arts or Master in Arts? I just want to read and write, goddamnit. I feel like a third world kid, trying to get an education here. I'm from Malaysia. I didn't even want to go to grad school!

I honestly don't care what kind of job I get. I just want a job I love. It can be teaching city kids to read Catcher in the Rye, for all I care. Why am I penalized for having too many interests? It's not like I want to be both a chemical engineer and a historian.

I'm so tired of worrying about how I'm going to look to a prospective employer or the grad school admissions office. I'm so tired of calculating my every move, fretting over what I put on a piece of paper and if it'll convince my employer that I am the best thing they've come across, of whether I've wasted my time doing something I think is beneficial to my development as a person in this world because I could have been doing something beneficial to my future. I can only tell half of the story. The other half is left to the employer to spin and weave. I'm at the end of my sophomore year, and I don't have a proper resume, because what is a "proper" resume in these times? Fuck the future, I want to live in the now. I just want to read and write.

If the Mayans are right, we're all dying in December anyway. Why am I worrying about a future that'll never come, right? I'm going to teach city kids to read Catcher in the Rye...oh wait, I can't. I don't have a resume.

The Renaissance age is truly dead.