Recently I've been considering changing from a Supply Chain & Information Systems major to English. Now before all of you ask why I want to do a silly and wholly unprofitable thing like that, I'll tell you. You may not understand, but I'll tell you.
Sometime last year, I tried to start this blog. I had come out of my Spring '06 semester with an excellent creative writing class with Dr. Judy Lindberg, an excellent English professor who I also had for a business writing class-in the same semester. I don't really remember much from the business writing class, but those I retain from English 050 shine like a new brass bell on a filthy old locomotive.
I'm not totally sure about the rest of the class, but I had liked to write before and Judy got me excited about it. We started out writing poetry, of all things-and I loved it. (to read some of my weird and woolly poems,
go here) Probably my favorite exercise was the short story we were assigned-I wrote it about two kids from America moving to Japan to start a band, and their problems in doing so. It turned out very nice.
For a long time before, I was also writing a piece of fanfiction for one of my favorite classic anime
series, Robotech. It was a beloved pet project and though I worked on it quite a bit, the only thing I completed was one chapter in the middle. That's no place to start a story, is it? A classic exception, of course is Tolkien and
The Hobbit-but Tolkien already had the foundation stories and legends (which would later become
The Silmarillion) written and largely completed by the time
The Hobbit was published. Thus, it's not an apt comparison.
I had also begun to write a fantasy story entitled
The Legend of Shayla, based on an idea I had come up with when trying my hand at an epic poem in the vein of
Barbarossa in Italy; which, oddly enough, I read long before college. I think I read it because of Microsoft's Age Of Empires II strategy game, where one of the campaigns involved Barbarossa. It never really progressed beyond the initial chapter of the poem, but much more recently bits and pieces have come together; I even drew a map of the world in which the story occurs.
All this is good and fine, right? Well, not entirely. Those of you trying to run Microsoft Train Simulator on a laptop should probably not do so, at least in my experience. My computer crashed because of it. I lost everything I had saved-which, in addition to the aforementioned writing, included a lot of music, railroad photos, and all of my work I had saved from my classes. I had kept number of things for reference; like homework and papers. Bad. Very bad. Very bad indeed.
For some of these things, I had hard copies; I had printed out my Robotech fanfic, but the copy I have now was out of date at the time of the crash.
The Legend of Shayla survived. My poetry survived because I had put it on the internet as we went through Eng 050. A paper on the history of the small arms used by the US Army during WWII perished in flames (although a copy may still exist in one of my portfolios from my senior year of high school) and I lost my wired copy of the story I wrote based on Rush's song Red Barchetta (print copies and internet publishing have saved that one) as well. Unfortunately, much of the Robotech fanfic's progress over that summer and two pages of my creative writing short story are gone forever. I was not able to recover the data due to a lack of funds (which I probably ate).
It also didn't help at all that this crash occurred just before I was to move into my first apartment in State College; I had to recover from that setback, as well as adjust to living on my own AND with strangers as roommates all around the same time. The former was fun; the latter was a bitch or two. Since then, my written output has slowed, and declined in quality as well, I am afraid. Originally, I set up this blog to counter that. But as it turns out, I'm just using it to recover. Again.
Which brings me to my point: I should have been an English major. I've screwed up this whole semester, including one class which was mostly writing assignments. It seemed pointless to write a page-long essay on a topic that could be condensed into a simple answer to a simple question. It didn't help that my professor for said class was a boring old fogey who worked for Duquesne Light for thirty years. No motivation whatsoever. It's like watching anything on MTV that isn't a music video: you just don't give a rat's ass.
I've lost interest in my major; I'm afraid of being cooped up in an office for thirty years and becoming all of my awful professors; and I have the drive and passion and all that other stuff needed for an English major, but it's buried beneath a thick layer of self-doubt, laziness, escapism and highly radioactive ash. No, really, it's there and I've seen it; it's just a matter of bringing in an emotional excavation crew and digging it out.
But I can't do what I love, apparently; my mother, especially keeps telling me to stick with SC&IS. "You'll make more money," she says. "So?" I say. "What the hell does it matter if I'm not happy?" "You could get stuck in an office, but you might not," she says. "I could get not stuck in an office, but I might," I say. "They're the same thing, and I don't like it/them." "You might not end up with a job in your field, like your dad," she says. (Incidentally, my dad has his degree from Penn State in geophysics, but he currently works with a database management system because the DBMS uses the same software he used in South America exploring for oil) "Okay, then I'll just go to work for a railroad as train crew, like I was gonna do from when I was little until we met that engineer from Conrail and I ended up talked out of it," I say. "But that's a hard job," she says. "So? Have I tried it? Have you tried it? I LIKE trains, remember? Maybe it's worth it."
And maybe it's not. Now I guess I'll never get to know whether either one-English or train crew-would have worked out.
