I'm actually not wholly convinced that this is what I should study (oh shit! confession made). It's only by process of elimination that I've arrived here. I know I'm not a chemist, I know I'm not a mathematician, a musician, an artist, a biologist, etc. etc, so on and so on until I reach the oh so logical conclusion that I therefore must be an English person.
Yes, I read (ad nasium). Yes, I take every opportunity to edit my cereal boxes' grammar. Yes, I could listen to my English professor go on and on about literature and theory all while wishing he was in a tweed jacket, but isn't there also supposed to be that inner knowing that yes, I AM a writer? Hm?
I surround myself with books, I listen to NPR, I sip coffee and read blogs. I'm more interested in unpacking a book's purpose than unpacking my purpose in doing so. I keep The List, ever-revised, ever-growing, of all the things I need to read before I can arrive as a credentialed academic. After all these habits are performed, after all my books are read, after I cough out some half-baked thought about authorial intention, diction, rhyme, meter, yaddah yaddah... what then?
I'm afraid that I'm just a dime-a-dozen English degree; a useless BA with no real talent or flare. I'm still hoping for my professors' approval, thinking them the gate-keepers to the discipline. And I'm therefore afraid that these gate-keepers will weed out the weak, the mediocre, the uninspired.
Maybe I'll just be a professional appreciator, instead.
There's a lot more to English than writing, ya know? Besides, Linguistics is its own thang.
ReplyDeleteHey, I'm willing to trade out that Scandinavia trip for a South America trip. You could immerse yourself in the dynamics of a foreign language, brush up on your Spanish, and I could gawk at the flora and fauna. Then you could blog about it. ;)