There's a World

Yesterday, over the lunch table, my folks got around to discussing a cousin of mine who recently graduated with two majors. Leslie's gotten a job since graduating -- but it's part-time, doesn't pay much more than minimum wage, and she's still looking for work. I thought I knew what I was in for: the standard grumblings of "Well, what good is that liberal-arts double-major?"

Just a few days before, I'd told a friend, "They probably wouldn't be nagging me so much over majors and job prospects if I were going to major in business or science as opposed to the liberal arts."

Instead, my father told my brother and me that no kind of major guaranteed more success, stability or respectability than the other. I could major in almost anything and I'd be fine, so long as I put everything I had -- my heart, mind, soul -- into it. (The main issue, of course, is that I haven't exactly been doing that.)

But in our currently shittastic economy, sometimes I wonder if even that's enough.

I've been telling my parents and Kory (much to their dismay) that I've counted on fully identifying with my job, just as I've fully identified with my role as a student for, what, fourteen, fifteen years? It's kind of ingrained into my mindset, if not my DNA. It rather shocks me that the most obvious danger of tying my identity to my job didn't really occur to me till I read this article.

It's kind of hard to think right now (mental overstimulation, perhaps?) so I'll probably have to return to this later. But will I actually come back and complete this post? Both my computer and my room are littered with things -- letters, books, journal entries -- that I always mean to come back and finish but never get to it because I'm either too busy or too lazy. Not a good way to be if you plan to have a career that happens to revolve around deadlines.

(Of course, said career has been undergoing a painful paradigm shift for the past year or two, but more on that later, perhaps.)