I don't ever expect to make money because I have and English B.A. degree. To do anything vaguely worthwhile in upper level English studies in the U.S., a person pretty much needs a PhD. In this lifetime, I will never have the money to get a PhD; I'll be working 40 hours a week from the time I get out of college till I die. Sad but true.
I would love to go to school forever and work in academia-land, but it's just not going to happen for me. Maybe if I was someone that came from money or if I was outstanding in some way, but I'm not. I'm just Kelsey. I have good grades, but that's about it. No one gives you money for that.
I like writing, I like theoretical ways of thinking, I like exploring things like Feminism, Queer Theory, Marxism and Critical Race Theory. It's escapism for me. It lets me deny my reality in favor of finding the structural similarities of Melanie and the bird in The Birds, exploring I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings as a coming of age story in Angelou's ideas about race, talking about how Emerson and Thoreau make us better citizens, tearing apart American hypocrisy with literature, exposing the gendered practice of getting coffee and finding the relationship of base and superstructure in Ode on a Grecian Urn. It's lame, I know, but I love this stuff. It makes sense to me. That was just a short list of stuff from this semester, I've done a lot of other cool things in my English classes, like:
1. Analyzing masculinity and the structure of the love story in Fight Club
2. Giving a 10-minute presentation on swearing. I got to say "cunt" in the classroom. I was stoked.
3. Writing and illustrating my own fairy tale in ENGL101. I'm still pretty proud of that thing.
4. Building a portfolio of original poems
5. Giving a ten-minute presentation and 8 page paper about how stupid the religious argument against Harry Potter is.
6. Giant, exhaustive research paper on female roles in zombie movies
7. Seriously bashing the founding fathers and the Christian right in Early Am Lit
What I love about it all is that you can take just about anything and make it interesting, and relate it to something you care about. All of my papers tend to be about female roles and stereotypes, racism, bashing organized religion or the government because that's what I care about. But you can make it into anything you care about.
After I took 122 with Mike Sell, I knew English was where I was supposed to be and he's probably the best professor I've ever had. He's challenging, makes you simultaneously love and hate him, and gives you as much as you give him. I'm really trying to have him a third time before I graduate.
English studies isn't going to pay the bills or cure cancer, but I feel most at home with this stuff. I wish I could just drop journalism entirely and do more with English, but I have to make my mom feel like the money she pays for me to go to school will eventually pay off. I'm really going to miss going to English classes after I graduate.
Here's some pictures from the Mattress Factory that I posted about yesterday, taken by Melissa Clark, because I didn't think we were going to be allowed to have cameras:
Douglas Perez, Ecosystem, 2009. Click for detail shot, the grey-ish looking bones
are actually bodies.
Yayoi Kusama, Repetitive Vision, 1996.
View from the mirrors on the ceiling. I'm reppin' the Hines Ward jersey.
Greer Lankton, It's all about ME, Not You, 1996.
Romantic Dollarscape Series, 2003. Pedro Alvarez.
There were another set of paintings I really liked by Armando Mareno with the tilde over the "n." http://www.mattress.org/index.cfm?event=ShowArtist&eid=96&id=488&c=Current
Oh, and RIP John Lennon.
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