(no subject)
So I was watching television earlier and drinking a cup of tea, hanging out downstairs by myself, and flipping through channels when I passed the Science Channel and saw a program on about radio astronomy. I watched it for the rest of the hour it was on and then watched the next one, about the future of the universe.
So that got me to thinking about my astronomy class in high school and how much I loved it, and how my favorite class was the one where we talked about quantum theory and after class my teacher gave me a copy of A Brief History of Time to read, and another book about black holes.
And that got me to thinking about how many astronomy books I've read, both as a kid and in the past few years. The Big Bang and other creation theories, the foundations of radio astronomy, history and physics of rockets, relativity, black holes, extraterrestrial intelligence, geomagnetic storms, cosmic rays, solar sails...I've read about them all and a lot more, and that's not even counting science fiction. I would sit for hours as a kid poring over the Star Guide at home, which I still have. I even made Jeremy watch the meteor shower with me this summer, although he doesn't like to stargaze, and spent the whole night distracted thinking about it. One of the most beautiful things I've ever seen was the full moon through a telescope in December of my senior year of high school, shivering outside the observatory. One of the other most beautiful things I've ever seen was the magnetic field caused by a solar flare that made the night sky look like great red waves of light. I don't recall when it was but I remember exactly what it looked like. (That wasn't meant to be melodramatic. I'm entirely serious.)
And then I thought about what I'm doing now and how much I've enjoyed it relative to how much I enjoyed studying astronomy in my free time. And I came to a really astonishing conclusion.
I pretty much hate being an English major. This is why I've been experiencing such educational apathy. I couldn't care less whether or not I put in any effort whatsoever towards English class, but that isn't because I don't like school, it's because I hate the field I'm learning about.
Literature doesn't make sense to me. Poetry, less sense. I enjoy reading it but hate analyzing it. My love of how words work together stems from language theory, which is to say linguistics, not literature itself. I literally hate the idea of teaching English literature and can't imagine myself ever, ever doing it, no matter how much people tell me it's inevitable. Literature classes bore me and I've hated the idea of them since high school. The only English class I've truly enjoyed was "Critical Genealogies" which I took in Ireland, and that's because it was based in literary theory. We didn't read any books but we just focused on the psychology behind them. Theory, not practice. I like critiquing others' writing but I know my own stuff isn't good enough to go anywhere and the idea of being a full-time writer exhausts me, even if I had the talent.
I guess just the idea of studying literature doesn't really make sense to me. Sure, it's interesting to see how the social and political events of an era shaped how the people of that era expressed themselves creatively, but it's nothing to build the rest of my career, my life on! I don't have any passion for it; I chose it essentially because I like to read and I'm good at bullshitting papers. How fucked up is that. And the thing is that English is typically a major that people fight for, that they defend against the naysayers. I've pretty much understood all along why people look down on English a bit, but kind of shrugged my shoulders and continued on doing whatever I was doing because hey, I may as well, no other fields are exactly jumping out at me.
Which those of you lucky enough (hah!) to know me for a while will recognize as the exact reason that I went along with Latin for so long, even though it was really the linguistics of it that I was interested in, not the language itself. I chose to apply to colleges based on their classics departments, and my commitment to that field didn't even last through the summer before my freshman year. So I chose English because hey, I read a lot, and I'm not that bad at writing papers, so I may as well.
I mean, because I'm bad at science, right?
Right?
I mean, I came close to failing physics in high school, so, clearly, science isn't for me.
(It's too bad that sarcasm doesn't translate through paper, because my mental tone typing that last sentence there was blistering.)
But I do honestly believe that at the time I was taking physics, at which time I was about...what. Fifteen? I didn't know how my brain worked yet. I didn't understand what studying and teaching methods worked for me - and, most importantly, I didn't realize that it wasn't necessarily my fault if I wasn't doing well in a class.
I had never been introduced to anything even remotely like physics before and it was totally alien material to me. I could memorize the equations and know how they worked and how to do the math, but there was an elemental disconnect in my head between the equations and their proper application. I don't know whether it was a product of the teaching method, or something else, but something about physics absolutely baffled me, and extra studying didn't help, and I tried and tried and tried to get it but couldn't. It was the supreme academic frustration of my high school career, besides my showdown with Hannah Barrett which was more sociological anyway.
I took astronomy in high school and got an A+, the highest grade I've ever gotten actually. So clearly, my grade in Advanced Physics in high school is not reflective of my scientific ability. But I was led to believe so. I didn't have stellar grades in chemistry, either; they were average, which wasn't good enough, or at least not as good as the grades I was getting in other fields, although I liked chemistry. So that automatically meant that science wasn't a good field for me; at least, it wasn't the one I was scoring well in, so I wouldn't get into as good schools on my science standing as I would otherwise. And I understood that logic and believed it myself, so went along with it since I was good at English and didn't, at that point, mind.
I wish to hell I'd known sooner that what you're good at isn't half as important as what you love to do. If someone maligns English majors around me, I don't really give a shit. Yeah, it is kinda stupid, analyzing the use of colors in Willa Cather's A Lost Lady. Who the fuck cares whether the roses in Neil's hands were red or white? I just want to read the story. I miss reading books because I want to. Sure, I've read a bunch of books that I enjoyed, but I had to do assignments for them that were inane and boring and pointless and I don't understand why anyone would want to teach this for a living.
Now, if someone were to say something fucking stupid about astronomy, about how it doesn't matter and whatever, I probably wouldn't say anything because I don't usually step up in situations like that, but if you were watching me you'd probably see me rolling my eyes and muttering something sarcastic under my breath, which is as proactive as I get in arguments unless someone specifically asks me a question.
But that's a whole other story, though I know pretty much why that happens now.
But anyway, yeah. I was hit with all of this stuff at once. And then the realization that, if true, I've absolutely wasted three crucial years of my academic career. I don't mean because I'm getting older or whatever, but it's not like I can just go "whoops! well let's start that over again!" and go back and do another three years of college because I made a mistake at the beginning of my college career.
I mean, sure, it isn't a total waste, because I read some good books and I'll have a linguistics minor, probably, but in terms of what I possibly could have accomplished by now in my preferred field and what I'd rather be doing, and in terms of how much work I'd have to do to play catch-up for a mistake I made four years ago when I didn't know what I wanted, the loss is devastating.
I tried to explain this to my housemates and one of them said she'd had the same problem last semester (she's a senior) but seemed really nonchalant about the fact that she's graduating in less than two months and going into a field that she doesn't want to be in. I don't understand how a person could not find this kind of thing upsetting. I didn't feel this much emotional upheaval when I broke up with Jeremy, or when Abby died, because those weren't personal failures and they were somewhat expected (pets die; relationships end; that's the way things are). But this was totally something I could have prevented, which is the worst kind of mistake for me since it means that I didn't look at the information at hand correctly. It's infuriating and embarrassing, especially on this kind of scale. I was on the verge of hysterics when I was thinking about all of this (though, thankfully, the emotional response passed relatively quickly).
I guess it's better that I figure this out now while there's still conceivably something I could do about it (though what, I don't know; I'm not made of money and I'll have enough bills to pay in eighteen months anyway).
I plan on trying to take astronomy before I leave SMC, maybe next semester, and if it turns out that that spark is still there, I'll...I don't know. I'll work wherever I can, whore myself out to the English industry or the ESL business, to put myself through undergrad classes in astronomy somewhere else and I can probably graduate in three or four semesters if I work hard enough and go from there; I graduated high school early, after all, so it's not that big a loss of time. I also have linguistics to fall back on, though as I've said you really need a master's to do anything worthwhile (that is to say, not teaching), so we'll see where that goes.
St. Michael's was a good choice for a typical college experience, but I wonder what would have happened had I gone to Boston or New York instead, like I could have. I probably would have recognized this sooner.
At any rate, this is going to make Niemi's American lit. class even harder to sit through. Fuck!