Too Cool for School

I just finished slogging through an 1130 page novel (Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson) about math in roughly two weeks (NOTE: page count added to indicate my reading speed in a book through which I'm "slogging").  Well, it wasn't really about math.  It was about World War II gold and the modern threat of the disintegration of traditional political and economic borders due to the encroaching inevitability of ubiquitous high-speed internet in southeast Asia the Philippines.  However, there was a staggeringly large amount of information on both number theory and cryptanalysis contained in the text.  Indeed, there was enough about it to cause a caesura in my reading of the novel, during which I read a bunch of free information about elementary number theory (available in your local library if you're a traditionalist, or on the internet if you're lazy).  It's been quite a long time since a novel has made me fundamentally question my worldview, and while I'm not sure if anyone else would accuse Stephenson of being an epiphany-inducing author, I am about to do so.

I've always loved stories, and whether those stories are contained in books, comics, video games, or films (pornographic or otherwise), I've been able to transport myself through time and space to really feel myself become part of the stories (especially the pornographic films).  Naturally, then, I majored in English Literature in college, where I learned that stories are both banal and a tool for white male imperialists desperately seeking to maintain their tenuous-yet-iron grip on the economic forces that keep them in power while holding down the rest of what could be modern society but is instead, thanks to those aforementioned stories, an ignorant mish-mash of uneducated wage slaves whose only function is to feed the maw of the white-male-ruled military-industrial complex. 

Right on, man, white males ruin everything.  Wait...what?

What I've realized, thanks in part to Stephenson's novel, is that the entire preceding sentence is, for lack of a better phrase, complete and utter horseshit (also see my humorously crossed-out phrase in the first paragraph).  Unfortunately, it's also completely and utterly the point of every literature class I've been a part of in the single undergraduate and two graduate institutions I've attended.  Assuming that the dominant discourse somehow pervades and greatly affects the quality of your daily life assumes that you have nothing better to do than sit around thinking about the which discourse(s) affect you and how you can somehow use them to facilitate financial gain.  This is the life of the social theorist, the cultural critic, and the English major, who, for all their theoretical smarts, still haven't figured out how to do anything that would be considered useful outside of academic circles.  If you think you're affected by the oppressiveness of a discourse, congratulations!  Your family was rich enough to send you to a college where they taught you about discourses. 

Thank god our discourse runs the world!

I wrote all that to write all this: I've spent the greater part of the past six years defending my decision to study literature, both to others and to the gnawing sense of regret that eats away at me when I try to make Photoshop work and it laughs at me.  I think now I'm finally man enough to admit I made a mistake when it comes to my chosen academic field, because I fell in with the crowd of story-haters.  After almost a decade of reading for academic gain, I'm  reading for pleasure again, and I've found the divine something that made me love stories in the first place.  This is why I crossed out the sentence in the first paragraph.  Neil Stephenson's book is certainly about the eroding of traditional concepts of border, but it's also just a really fucking cool story about war, smart people, computers, and Cap'n Crunch. 

I've realized that the absolute dumbest thing you can do is study something you love in college, unless that something is one of the sciences or mathematics, where you genuinely need the massive amounts of resources a university can place at your disposal in order to advance in the field.  If you like music, stay away from musicology.  If you like stories, stay away from literature.  If you like God, then absolutely stay away from theology courses. 

Of course, this won't be true for everyone.  If you genuinely believe the world operates on a sub-conscious level, that we are all controlled by philosophical ideas spinning in the vortex of our minds, then go become a cultural critic, and write a book about the dairy discourse perpetuated by entrenched power-farmers who seek to keep most of us in chains while offering us only delicious cheese to pay for the labor they steal from our very bones.  I, however, will go ask an evolutionary biologist why cheese is so fucking delicious, and where I can get some.