Aspirate, How So?

[nirinia]

I live, I aspirate! (That is a really useless allusion.) And I am sort of back at LJ. I've been busy caring for our charges – Anette and I've shared the responsibility – which entailed dragging them around campus on a pub-crawl, getting uselessly drunk in general and showing them where to get good coffee. We've been drinking too much, but that's student's privilege. The cunning plan (if all else fails, get them drunk) worked: everyone bonded. And I've found a platonic soulmate in Vanja, who happens to own about as much make-up as I do, read as much, and share my taste in men.

We went to a lecture about Coetzee and Knausgård, that finally crystallised my issues with my education. It is not science, it is culture. Utterly useless as a profession.

I survived a visit to the dentist yesterday; I went half-hoping for a wisdom's tooth showdown, half not. It might not be the best idea to go to a lecture drooling blood. They are both going away the 16. September, at last. Today I've dragged my eyes through 50 pages of Austen's Emma. Free indirect style doesn't really help, it is horribly boring.

Did I mention that we bought tickets to New York? We did.

Comments

[drunkenchipmunk.livejournal.com]

My sister keeps going on about New York, I think it would freak me out!

[nirinia.livejournal.com]

It is heavenly! If you like big cities, that is. It is essentially a regular city, only gone American: which means ten times as big, ten times the melting-pot.

[vastatuuli.livejournal.com]

Comforting to hear that student life is the same everywhere. At least in the Nordic countries... :) I know how many people feel about the Humanities, that it's not science, but I've always felt more at home with people who are interested in such subjects. I think of myself as a humanist despite the fact that I study in the Faculty of Science. Culture isn't useless, even though I agree that going into the labour market with "expert of literary culture" printed all over your papers may be tough. But if that's what you want to do, that's what you've got to do. Although I got the impression from an earlier entry in your journal that you're considering studying something else. Or was it just a thought?

[nirinia.livejournal.com]

I would be very surprised it it were not :]

It was not so much a dig at culture in general, as at literature studies in general. The entire field is rotten to the core, and so unscientific it makes me cringe. Precisely the fact that you can be a humanist even while you are involved in a completely different field is what makes it so difficult: the humanities are part of general culture, and a pre-requisite for being 'cultured'.

I can't even imagine the horrors of trying to sell a "expert of literary culture" and 'I know a lot about languages!'-degree. It should be made into a sit-com. No, no, you're right. I'm completing this BA, and going into either law or medicine. Can't decide which one for the life of me, but it's one of the two. So I'll be a very cultured surgeon or lawyer, in a decade or so.