Monday, September 13, 2004
(7:05 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Monday Self-Indulgence Post
Have pity on me, readers! I am depressed! I am testy! I'm not sure what I want to do with my life! I'm young and confused. At the age of 24, I find myself -- shockingly -- tired of sitting in classrooms! Part of me wants to do a UK doctorate so that I don't have to do any more coursework, but part of me realizes that that is nonsense, since I am arguably not prepared in any single academic field (other than English Lit, which I don't want to do). Yet another part of me -- they're proliferating as we speak -- thinks that I've already read too many books and that I don't need to isolate myself any further from the general population and spend the rest of my life miserable and alone, but then there's another part that thinks that the problem with the general population is that they don't read enough books and that maybe the best thing I could do is to put myself in a position where I could convince at least a few people to read a few more books. Do I need a doctorate to do that? Probably not -- I could instantly go teach at some charter school in our rapidly privatizing, de-unionizing secondary education system, rather than in our rapidly corporatizing higher education system. Or hell, why not become a priest? But that would require more coursework....So I'm in a bind. I mean, I'm still totally on board for the prospect of spending a couple hundred dollars applying to graduate programs -- no question there. Filling out all that paperwork and getting together all those recommendations and maybe, if I'm lucky, taking the GRE again, when I already feel overwhelmed by the amount of shit I have to do -- I'm totally up for that. It seems like a great way to spend my time. Especially since I am increasingly destroying the one concrete benefit I gleaned from my Olivet education, which was freedom from debt. Do I just put the grad school application game aside for this year, then work off my loans next year? Do I come up with some way to go to France or do something cool? Do I leave this fucking hole and move to Milwaukee, since the center of gravity of all the interesting people in my life has been shifting distinctly Wisconsinward for quite some time now? WHAT DO I DO?! I need to know, right now, so that I can take action, right this minute.
The thing that sucks about Milwaukee, though, is commuting to the south side of Chicago (since I was probably going to move at the end of this week). Hyde Park can gentrify all it wants -- that doesn't make public transit any less horrible. Maybe I could take that one last New Testament course I need to pick up next semester at Marquette, then write my thesis in the land of cheese. Maybe I could then join Jeff Snowbarger at UW's comp lit program. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Groundless speculation: I hate it.
Oh, if you've made it this far, go take à Gauche's lyric quiz. It's apparently going to be a weekly series, an attempt to catch up with what he (perhaps unfairly) characterizes as The Weblog's "bi-weekly decadence" (referring to the Thursday Translation Attempt, which is almost certainly going to happen this time, and the Friday Afternoon Confessional).
UPDATE: The comment thread to Anthony's last post makes me think that it might be necessary to stay in a school with the words "divinity" or "seminary" in its name for as long as possible, just to piss people off.
