It's been a long time since I last posted (insert usual excuse about how busy life has been). But no seriously. I have been rather overwhelmed lately. One of the biggest things that's had me running around in circles was figuring out exactly what I'm doing with my academic life. It's not that I don't know what I wanna do when I "grow up." It's that I know I don't want to do the same thing for my entire life, and my interests are so broad that I wish I knew how to educate myself in preparation for all of them. Unfortunately it would probably take me approximately 7452.89 years to graduate if I took all the classes for things that I might want to do with my life. I feel like this is a pretty common problem for a lot of people, really. Everyone seems to think that now is the time that they should know what they want to do with their lives, and they start panicking because they don't. Well, rest assured, general public of panicking college students; you are faaaar from alone in your confusion.
Speaking in the vein of academic and life confusion, I recently made the switch from being an education minor to a lit minor. I did it for practical reasons, really. I want to teach in an education program for incarcerated youth. The best way to get into those programs (according to the information they put out there on the web, at least) is to have background in a normal area of education and perhaps some experience as a teacher in public or private school. So lit teacher position, here I come! Why, might you ask, do I not have some combo of major/minor in lit and education? Well, I'm a justice major. And I love it. I flim-flammed about for a while thinking "Fuck. Fuck fuck fuckety fuck I have no idea what I'm doing or if I need this major but I don't wanna drop it just in case I do but what if I don't but I might I'm not sure holy shit." It was really my experience switching to a lit minor that convinced me that keeping my Justice major is okay, and makes sense.
I was hesitant about switching my minor. The realization that I wanted to be a lit teacher in public school for a little while before moving on to the reformation programs threw me off kilter a little bit. After having already changed my major, I wasn't really sure if changing anything else was the right decision. I have a tendency to get really impulsive sometimes and jump into things and then decide I have changed my mind, and it's getting a little late for me to be jumping around between majors and minors and whathaveyou. But I switched into the lit minor. And starting taking Interpreting Lit.
It's a gened class, so a lot of the kids in it aren't necessarily all that into lit. So I was going to have to get my energy from myself on this one. The first few classes weren't that bad. It was nice to be doing some lit readings again, instead of text books. Analyzing the first couple of plays we read was a good experience. And then it came time to write my first lit paper since I graduated from highschool almost two years ago.
Of course, the day before the paper was due, I had two classes followed by work, consecutively. Got back from work at seven and grabbed some food so I could start functioning more like a normal human and less like a zombie-esque humanoid. Figured I'd start my paper or go to the gym after that....no. Fire alarm. Spend half an hour in McKinley with a group of very depressed/angry/annoyed looking fellow dorm-dwellers. Get inside with just enough time to get ready and head out to an intramural basketball game. Get back to the dorm at almost 11. Eat again and decompress until 1. Start lit paper. Realize I no longer have the instructions for the paper. E-mail lit professor explaining that I'm an idiot. Start writing paper anyway.
At this point, it was almost 2 a.m. and the four hours of sleep from the night before just weren't cutting it anymore. So I left the rest of my paper for the morning. When I woke up in the morning I had a general hatred of life, solely based upon the fact that I was awake, and my eyelids were rebelling against this state of affairs. But I forced myself to sit up, wake up, and start to write my paper.
The book that this paper was supposed to be written on was As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner. The basic guideline was essentially just pick a passage, do a close reading, talk about the meaning of the book as derived from that passage. If you've never read this book, you should know that it's full of complex passages that all mean something. Honestly, it's a beautiful piece of work. And I am so grateful that it was the subject of my first literature paper in college. Before I started writing, I had forgotten how it felt to delve deeply into someone's words and pull out a coherent interpretation. Even writing my intro, late at night, on little sleep, I was interested, but not invested. But the next morning, when I sat down, and I looked at that text and starting pulling strings in my brain and building tiny bridges between different words and situations... I felt like I found an energy I lost a long time ago. It's been a long time since I've felt truly overflowing with passion about something I was writing.
It's not to say that I am not interested and excited to write many of my papers. This was an experience on an entirely different plane, though. It was like a 3 year old with ADHD who was sugar high on Christmas was jumping around inside my brain. It was awesome. It was everything that I've been missing from my college experience so far. I am legitimately excited to go to this class and discover new secrets about the text and then walk away still thinking about it for the rest of the night. In other words, I'm so excited that I'm taking a literature class and getting the opportunity to do close analysis of great literature, that I'm still talking about it.
Moral of the story? Do what you want. Literature is what I decided I wanted to do, and I wasn't sure whether I could do it or not. I allowed myself to go to it for practical reasons, but I am so, so happy that I am doing this now. A lot of my friends know what they want to do but are scared to pursue it, or they pursue an alternative for "practicality's sake." Seriously, though... I have no idea if having an awkward combination major of Justice and minor of Lit is going to actually prove practical in the long run, but I'm finding it worth it if only for the fact that I might actually enjoy my classes for the next two years of my life and come away with knowledge in areas that I actually care about.
And that totally, totally makes it worth it to me.
