Hey everyone! What’s going on?
So, as you may remember from me mentioning it about 446d5 times, I am an English Major. WELL actually an “English and Creative Arts” slash Asian Studies (Anthropology) Major, BUT I DISPLAY THE CHARACTERISTICS OF AN ENGLISH MAJOR.
“What ARE these characteristics?”, you ask.
Well, that sounds like a good idea for a blog!
The first characteristic of an English Major is what I call “writer disease”. English majors like writing. They can go on and on and on about anything and everything as long as they are writing about it. We can tell you all about history, culture, writers, themes, media, styles, cliches, tropes, languages, EVERYTHING. This is because our degrees give us so many electives and choices, that, even with a double major/degree, we can learn about so many amazing things just by doing core units. However, we can only tell you about these things through references in our writing, or by toiling over words for hours. This is because we are not experts at any given thing. Our brains are basically wikipedia, but they are wikipedia if wikipedia was actually a set of encyclopedias that weren’t really ordered very well but still had a billion links to various tangents. This is evident in my comment on the ANZAC Day post. That took me all fucking morning to write and I knew exactly what I wanted to say. I just needed to consult my brain.
David: “Oh hey brain! Can you tell me all about the stolen generation?”
David’s Brain: “FUCK YOU FEED ME COFFEE GET A JOB FIND A HOUSE TALK TO YOUR SISTER”
2 hours later…
OK SO STOLEN GENERATION…
40 minutes later
AND THAT’S WHY AUSTRALIA IS FUCKED. ALTHOUGH IT IS NOT THE ONLY COUNTRY STAINED BY RACISM…
40 more minutes later
AND THAT’S WHY THE SOUTHERN US DEMOCRATS WERE RACIST FUCKS WHO MURDERED BLACK PEOPLE. RACISM DIDN’T STOP WITH BLACK PEOPLE, HOWEVER…
40 more minutes later again
WHICH IS WHY JAPAN WAS ALL “WWII, BITCHES”… NOW LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT THIS BATTLE…
.etc
So yeah, it LOOKS like I know about all these things, and deep down in my brain somewhere, I do, very well. There’s just too much other shit swimming around for it to surface as soon as it is needed.
Also I am a rabid, binge drinking, alcoholic Australian. This slows the process down quite a lot…
What happens is, once we get into a certain context, or train of thought, we are on so much fucking fire that it actually means we don’t need to eat for days. We can write and write and write until even the most devoted reader will get sick of our constant stream of shit contextual facts. It just takes time to get the engine powered up.
So we’ve got “writer’s disease”, the next characteristic is the dreaded “being offended by everything” which is because of something I call a “context cocktail”. It is related to, and a leading cause of “writer’s disease”
Once English Majors actually get down to “Englishing” (VERY DECEPTIVE TERM AS IT ACTUALLY USUALLY MEANS “LITERATURE” IN GENERAL, THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT IN REGARDS TO CONTEXT COCKTAILS), we read lots. We read so much that we lose track of entire weeks. Last night I actually had a dream that I was reading a novel. It was actually Sense and Sensibility (By Jane Austen, obviously, if you didn’t know that I am judging you). I was actually reading Sense and Sensibility in my mind and it actually was just my subconscious, displaying page after page of the novel, and I was actually reading it. THAT IS HOW MUCH WE READ, PEOPLE.
HOWEVER, most of this reading isn’t actually the novel that we are currently devouring. That pleasure is a reward for spending a long time reading ABOUT the novel. We want to know everything about the context of the novel so that, when we read it a second time (obviously we read it first to digest it with our OWN, CURRENT, context), we are in a position to further understand the story and the writer and the characters and the setting. This means that we learn to see the world from EVERYONE’S point of view and realise that EVERYONE is fucked and EVERYONE is wrong and EVERYTHING is offensive. An example: For my dissertation, I wrote about nobel prize winning literature from China, Austria, Japan and England (prizes if you can name the Authors!! Writers, you may need a few hours for your brain to try to remember these things) and how important contextual information was in regard to these pieces AND how translating them to English would destroy some of the original meaning and the beauty of the language, but then create others. This means that I read a lot, and a lot more, and then some more about Austria and China and Japan and not England because I am half English and was using that as an example of “my own context”, so I didn’t want to usurp that by adopting Doris Lessing’s context (oops! I ruined the guess who game, sorry!). This meant that I got angry (for the 42957th time) at the USSR, I felt sorry for the billions of Japanese people who have constantly been raped of their national identity and realised that the history and cultural spirit of China is so vast that I could never possibly hope to grasp very much of it at all. SO NOW I GET OFFENDED WHEN PEOPLE ARE DICKS TO: CHINA, RELIGIONS, JAPAN, THE JAPANESE IDENTITY, CULTS, AUSTRIA, POOR PEOPLE, POLICE, SAME SEX RELATIONSHIPS, THE WRONGLY ACCUSED, OLD PEOPLE, AND ETHNIC GROUPS IN ENGLAND, just from reading/writing about 4 books. I have been doing this extensively (aka for study) since Year 11 (I am not counting year 10 level as advanced enough, or this would be even longer). So six years. With about 12 “texts” in High School and at least about 50 through Uni. The above list was, on average, three points of being offended per text. That is at least 192 things that offend me, JUST FROM READING. These are serious and generalised things, too. If you broke say “RELIGIONS” down, you’d get “Being offended because religions are dicks”, “being offended because people don’t respect others’ beliefs”, “being offended because people don’t TRY to understand others’ beliefs” .etc
THEN THERE IS MY OWN CONTEXT, EVERYONE. I am offended by a lot of things because of my own context. This can vary from “being offended when people write “lyk dis bcuz dey tink its kool u guyz your just an h8rs [sic].”" To “being offended because there were only about 4 women in total who were performers during the entire soundwave festival”.
The next characteristic is what I like to call “not having a job because the university can only hire so many people before it gets ridiculous and to actually work in a bookstore or something you need to be really really really lucky, especially in Melbourne when there are 4w957349 74235 arty people without jobs”.
WHY DON’T WE HAVE JOBS, EVERYONE? It is simple. We basically have a sheet of paper that says
“Oh hey, I know a lot about a lot of things but none of that really relates to the real world because I live in a bubble where everything is OK because I understand everyone’s point of view and think that everyone does as well but actually the real world (slash this organisation) is actually fucked and full of discrimination and this degree is basically a warning siren that I’m probably actually going to complain about all the fucked-upness that you’re hoping people won’t bring up and you’ll have to put up with me doing this when you could just hire a business graduate who will just do the job without asking questions because they just want billions of dollars. Besides, reading is more of a hobby, anyway, there are a lot of people who studied “real” degrees who read quite a bit, like my sister or my friend, Matt. Here are their numbers, they would be better at this job, anyway.”
“with Honours.”
“PS: Ignore the fact that I can write/type a billion words per minute and that I can basically learn anything really quickly and that I was smart enough to get High Distinctions at University because everyone knows that English Majors don’t ever do any work ever, obviously that’s how they got this piece of paper.”
WHICH LEADS TO “BITTERNESS”, THE FINAL CHARACTERISTIC OF AN ENGLISH MAJOR.
We. Hate. The. World. We spend hours and hours (usually all at once, the few weeks before the end of semester) working and sculpting words and just generally being fucking amazing and debating and having discussions and talking about every topic under the sun. This is because we are at University because we want to be scholars. We are intelligent and driven and have something that no amount of money could ever buy. We don’t have a price and so we don’t improve the economy, and people with money don’t want to pay up to be told how fucked they are and how uneducated they are and therefore we carry the stigma of being “useless” and “lazy”.
COULD YOU FEEL THE BITTERNESS DRIPPING FROM THAT PARAGRAPH? SEE!
You know what. My last semester at Uni, I watched a billion TV shows, barely went to class and wrote all my assignments at the last minute. Not because I was particularly lazy. Just because I knew there was no necessity, no logic, to work my hardest when I knew I could get amazing marks with the effort that I gave (PS: I did). Plus also I spent most of my nights living in a theatre actually trying to work and was always too tired to put up with stupid people at Uni. Still, even I joke about how I did nothing for my degree and how “easy” English Majors are. Even so, I am pretty sure I wouldn’t trade having these characteristics for anything. So fuck off.
EDIT: OH MY FUCKING GOD (my god is Emily Deschanel, btw) YOU GUYS. I FORGOT THE MOST IMPORTANT PART OF BEING AN ENGLISH MAJOR:
BEING OBSESSED WITH THINGS.
We can very easily/already are obsessed with:
- Characters in books/movies/TV shows (like Emily Deschanel’s portrayal of Dr Temperance Brennan)
- Smart people
- Coffee
- Books
- Writing
- Conversations
- Tank Girl
- Being offended by things
- Learning about everything
- Being arty
- Ourselves
- America’s Next Top Model/Tyra Banks *snap snap snap*
- Thinking we are better than everyone else
- Sexuality
Just to name a few.
I have not yet discovered WHY it is that we collectively become obsessed with things. All I know is we cannot simply “like” something, or “like to hate” something. We obsessively love and/or love to hate EVERYTHING.
PS: Tune in tomorrow for “How To Be A Pretentious Artist #002″. I think this post changed from being funny/a joke to being serious, OH SNAP I’M SORRY, EVERYONE. A perfect example of “writer’s disease” because I got all fired up and went on and on and on for like, an hour.
