Coming to the defense of my arts degree

I was having lunch with a friend the other day and this dude comes along and jumps right into our conversation. With his pizza and his little stare, he started bagging my arts degree. He started with saying, “I can’t believe the entrance scores for Arts and Science are the same. Clearly Science is much harder.” Clearly! It went straight downhill from there until all I could do was cross my legs and my arms and gaze off into the distance, biting my tongue. I don’t know why I was so mad. I’ve had people bag my arts degree before – my brother, my cousins, and all those articles on Yahoo! that tell me my degree is useless. And it probably is, for practicality’s sake, but what about the place of beauty and pleasure in the world?

My friend asked me, when we had left (under the excuse that I was freezing and needed to be indoors), why I hadn’t said that, why I hadn’t defended my arts degree. And…I don’t know. Probably because there was absolutely nothing witty that came to mind to defend my degree just because there’s something intrinsically important about the arts that I had never thought of defending it before. All I wanted to say to the dude was, “You. Me. Outside. Now” (add threatening hand gestures here).

On living in the present.

“For just one second, look at your life and see how perfect it is. Stop looking for the next secret door that is going to lead you to your real life. Stop waiting. This is it: there’s nothing else. It’s here, and you’d better decide to enjoy it or you’re going to be miserable wherever you go, for the rest of your life, forever.”

Lev Grossman, The Magicians

Sometimes I wonder if all I’m ever meant to do is wait for the next big thing to come. Okay, I don’t wonder about it or wish it upon myself so much as fear that this might be the recurring pattern in my life, the groove in the wheel that I’ll forever be stuck on. All this web-surfing, this blog-reading is making my miserable ethics essay seem even more and more miserable. Of course these beautiful sunshiney days we’re having doesn’t help one bit either.

What's in here. Compared to...