Degrees of Separation
Over a slow morning at work, I finally got around to writing thank you emails to a few of my professors in the English department. Writing to English professors daunts me because emails inevitably become one more piece of writing open to scrutiny. Though I know I won’t be graded, my words are nevertheless a reflection of my education—an education shaped by the very people to whom the writings are addressed. Which is why I’ve been putting them off for so long.
In an email to Prof. Hammer (remember him from this?), I spilled a few anxieties about Life After Yale:
Am I a doctor? A writer? If I combined the two with a hyphen, which would come first, and would I be happy?
To be honest, right now I am little of either. No longer an English major, but not yet a medical student—the nebulous, identity-effacing in-between. My hours are made up of work, Google chats with geographically-sequestered friends, and the eternal quest to locate a five-star, one-dollar-sign eatery within a 5-mile radius of my house. This last task requires neither medical knowledge (except perhaps counting calories) nor linguistic expertise (I don’t even bother to write reviews). Sometimes the work is outsourced to Marvin while I supervise from afar (read: lay comatose on the bed). It’s not a bad life, though I get home every evening exhausted and wanting, vaguely, to write and make some use of myself, to knock off another essay from my Trello board. But most of the time I sit around doing a whole lot of nothing except wondering when we will upgrade our wifi–the main barrier between me and a more elaborate means of procrastination such as YouTube.
A huge perk of being an English major was getting to read books all the time. Never did I worry about not being “well read”; never did I speak the words, “I wish I had more time for pleasure reading,” for reading itself was a pleasure. (If the latter statement did not resonate with you, I seriously advise against majoring in literature.) I always assumed that reading would be an important part of my life, along with all the other things I’ve taken for granted (ungreasy Chinese food, God, access to a laundry machine). The past five weeks of work, or as I like to think of it, “real life,” have proven me wrong. I read for approximately one hour per day, almost exclusively during my commute. Twenty-five minutes on the Caltrain twice a day, sometimes squished between other passengers, sometimes leaning against a cold railing or—on lucky days—with my butt on an actual seat. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, when the office disperses for lunch, I catch a few peeks at New Yorker articles while munching on take out at my workstation. For the past month, I’ve subscribed to daily New Yorker newsletters. Every morning at 6AM, a hunky spambot picks out the cream of the literary crop and plops it into my inbox. At lunch, I sort out the newsletters that have accumulated over the past few days and read whatever catches my eye. (This, by contrast, is never outsourced to Marvin as I am loathe to recommend to other people things which I have not read myself.)
But it all pales in comparison to the reading I did as an English major, in both quantity and intensity. I hardly make notes in the margins of my book-of-the-week or ponder questions to discuss at the next class. Nor have I done any substantial writing since the day I submitted my Writing Concentration project in mid-April. Surely some part of my brain must be withering from disuse, and the thought terrifies me. What if I will never be a better writer than the day I turned my project in? What if I will never be a closer reader than the night I wrote my last poetry essay? I once assumed that knowledge and skills were wholly transferable and enduring, yet I wonder how much I will leave behind when I walk through the doors of the Annenberg Building at Mount Sinai in five weeks.
Beneath the white coat, who will I be?
A B.A., an M.D. I only hope that the five letters of my name will be worthy of the ones that follow.