Drinking Coffee

At the 2007 CCCC I went to the exhibitors' hall on the last day and scored myself some free books. One of them was a short story collection by ZZ Packer titled Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, which I finished reading...finally, just a few days ago.

The collection is wonderful, and I hope you get to read it one day if you haven't already. Please don't think that it'll take you nine years to finish it—once I got started, I was done with it in just a few days.

The titular story is about a woman who enters an Ivy League school as a freshman and learns—and is made to reaffirm—all the injustices tied to being black, female, and queer (though she doesn't identify herself in all of those categories).


But what the story "Drinking Coffee Elsewhere" reminded me of was that funny process by which people who go to university choose their undergrad majors. For career reasons? For friends? For interest?

When I was still an undeclared undergrad over a decade ago, my advisor-to-be gave me one of his many and best advices: "Don't major in something because it'll help you get a job; major in it because you want to learn more about it."

Of course the man was a professor of Elizabethan drama, and I doubt there was any job to be gotten with a major in English. But major in English I did, because I wanted to learn more about it—to read more books, to know more about their authors, to write and talk about them within circles of people who also were interested in English literature.

I took a roundabout way to get to where I am today, but I wished that the students around me now also had the luxury of majoring in something because they "wanted to learn more about it". I don't know how many Business majors I've met who tell me that it'll help me get a job (which I'm sure isn't false) or Japanese majors who seem intent on finding a job as a translator. Those things are all possible but not necessarily guaranteed—and to get to those places, you need a lot more than just a piece of paper that says you got your Bachelor's in fillintheblankhere.

Whereas majoring n something for the pure joy and curiosity of learning something... If you can afford to do that, I have a feeling the experience will be both more enjoyable and perhaps even more successful—because you're taking classes in a topic that you want to know more about anyway, so wouldn't you automatically work harder at it? Who knows—I'm just a bookworm who found a way to major in, basically, bookworming. And this here bookworm is now so lucky that she can watch anime all day and call it "work"...

[That there is a little lizard in my kicthen! Awe...]