The Cynic's Dream

Bronner's Soap quote of the day: "Only hard work-God's Law can save us, but if we teach only our clan? We're all hated then!"* And now, on to the post!

I'm preparing to enter the final year for my Bachelor's of English Lit. This makes me qualified to discuss 3 things:
1) English Literature
2) the fact that, for the last time, I don't want to be a teacher, for fuck's sake**
3) the fact that I am excited to take my $21,000 worth of education and put it to good use in a restaurant somewhere.****



Apparently, there was at some point a sub-culture of hopeful BA-students who were under the impression that a degree in English Literature would guarantee them a job in some sort of literature-related field. I don't know who these people are. I've never met them, probably because they are all disgruntled waitresses now and I don't actually know any waitresses (not personally). But I've heard enough about them, and read enough of their blogs, to know that my wonderful shiny lit degree will at most guarantee that I know something about books and have read a lot of them.


I went into University knowing full well that I was throwing money away for the love of books and not much more. This is what I call The Cynic's Dream: it is a wonderful new twist on The American Dream (which even Canadians buy into at times). In the American Dream, anyone can become anything they want to be. In the Cynic's Dream, you do whatever the hell you want to and still end up making minimum wage at Burger King. I thought that everyone else was on the same page as to why I was getting my degree (as in for no good reason but I had an entrance scholarship so....). But after a few months of schooling, I realized that when I told people that I had absolutely no plan of what to do with my degree, they were often insulted on my behalf. Some even tried to reassure me that my degree will be 100% useful for something someday. Well of course it will be. But maybe not in the making-money-to-live-off-of stream.

I don't like insulting people with my own mediocrity, so for a while I tried switching to the "no seriously, I have a plan" strategy. This is where I tell people I want to be an Aquisitions Editor, and since no one except other aquisition-editor hopefuls know what that is, everyone just looks at me blankly. Then I explain what it is, and they pat me on the shoulder and tell me that Publishing is a very competitive field to get into and do I have a back-up plan?

This is when I switched to the 'secret plan' strategy. In this plan, when people ask me what I'll be doing with my Lit degree ("oh! So you want to teach?"**), I tell them that I know a lit degree doesn't guarantee a job in a lit field, but I secretly intend to publish a novel and live off of my earnings. No one likes this one either, though, because all this means is I'm spending money to learn something that I've been able to do since I was 12 (write novels) and I'm never going to make it anyway, so everyone knows that really, my plan all along was to work at Burger King. They are insulted by this.

So then I tried this new strategy, which is that I tell people I'll continue to bake after my degree, because I Just Love Baking So Much! and then they tell me I can get a job in publishing. So then I tell them that an English degree is all about communicating and so I could get any job I wanted in a Communications field. So Versatile! And then I go back to being a cupcake baker, because, let's face it, I'm in this for the cynicism, anyway.


*if you don't know what I'm talking about, my assistant will explain it to you. But you'll have to read a lot.

**because if I wanted to be a teacher I'd be taking a degree in Education. I'm not a moron.***

***well, not for THAT reason.

****Yeah, that's right. Education is amazingly cheap in Canada. And I can still barely afford it.