Stumbling into reality, a little unprepared

BY AARON ZAMOST

EUGENE WONG/YH

I don't feel like dancing around the subject, so I'll just say it: I have no idea what I'm doing with myself. But the scary thing is that I think that I'm fine with it. It's that Zen-like bliss that arrives when you realize how terribly unimportant certain "big deals" really are. It's like when you entered middle school and realized that all that crap you worried about in elementary school was such a joke. But middle school, now that's a big deal. Then you get to high school and realize that you never should have worried about anything in middle school—and so on, and so on. Let's just say it's hard to motivate yourself to write that paper for your "Native American Art in the Pacific Northwest and Arctic Region" (History of Art 406b) when you realize that, in less two months, you won't really care about Native American art.

While the rest of my roommates finish their senior essays in economics and political science, content with their imminent careers as consultants and business analysts (apparently, my roommate will analyze business), I, the history of art major, sit around thinking about the Kwak-wahkwahk, watching Comedy Central's That's My Bush and pondering life as a high school teacher. Simply to reiterate: I have no future.

I think this is Yale's fault. I mean, what did I learn in college, really? I learned that if I have to, I can write a 10-page paper in a day without a problem. I learned that staring at two paintings and comparing them is a lot easier than an astronomy problem set. But knowing how to write 15 pages about Roy Lichtenstein's Brushstrokes series does not qualify me for a job. Definitely not.

School was not real life, no matter how much I naïvely thought it would be when I left high school. Yale put me in a Gothic castle, gave me a card with my picture on it that I could swipe for food, and said, "You're 18 years old, basically you can do whatever you want." I took a class freshman year titled "Myth, Science and Philosophy in Ancient Greece," one sophomore year about jazz, and another that year simply titled "Color." These are the kinds of things I studied. Looking over my transcript I don't see a single "Urban Studies 341a: My First Mortgage" or any other class that might seem remotely related to something I could use in real life. (No joke, I just spent 10 minutes trying to come up with a second "practical" class, but since I don't know what other skills are useful in the real world, I couldn't come up with one.) I guess this would all be very different if I were pre-med.

I guess I could be corny and say something like, "But I learned something else in my four years here." (That's a sentence that'll get you either a Yale Daily News column or a quote in Rumpus.) It really is okay to wander aimlessly through Yale with no direction. Sure, major in art history or Am-erican studies—hell, go ahead and make up one of those crazy special divisional majors if you want to. This is not real life no matter how much we sometimes think it is, so it is definitely okay to take Yale up on its yay-for-humanism Ivy League attitude.

Yes, it's true: my id has had my superego by the balls for this entire semester, and I definitely could have benefited from doing some extra work, which might have resulted in better grades or a better job (although I really shouldn't be talking about a "better job" since I don't have a "job" in the first place). Nevertheless, I'm sure things will work out fine, even if I am "Mr. Zamost" to a bunch of 16 year-olds.

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