zarth

Going to go meet with one of my old professors today to discuss grad school.

The last year and a half, since graduation, has been hard. When I originally went back to college, sickened to the quick by the prospect of being a janitor for the rest of my life, I had the notion of becoming a history professor. In my senior seminar (the first of three attempts), however, I ended up butting heads with an egotistical prick of a professor who'd irrevocably decided I was an unreconstructed Marxist unworthy of serious consideration simply because I'd mentioned the word "imperialism" at our first meeting and was interested in studying "relevant" history.

He was a Renaissance specialist, he didn't like that.

I flunked that class. Added a lingusitics major to the history, just to stay sane. I love language, and thinking about it, but I see it as more of a hobby than a profession. But although there are some fascinating sociological dimensions to it, they don't get a lot of attention in the science (think about how affronted we get by "incorrect" uses of language, for example). Linguistics, too, mostly tends to fail the "relevance" test.

My next attempt at completing the senior seminar had to with African independence movements. I was looking forward to do a research project on Nigeria, but it turned out we were restricted to Kenya. Hard to sympathize with the Kikuyu, in my own opinion - FGM is way the fuck too important to them, a freakin' "cornerstone of their culture." I'm sorry, but my cultural relativism doesn't go that far. Add to that the fact that, for our final "project," the professor wanted us to do a freakin' collage instead of a paper, and . . .

I flunked that class, too.

So this professor I'm seeing today was the last attempt. The seminar was on "Stalin and Stalinism," and I took it simultaneously with a class on "Germany 1914-1945."

I thought I was so tough when I registered for those two at the same time. As well as clever, since the two had so much overlap.

I had nightmares constantly that quarter.

But I got my A's, and completed the req, and finally got the hell out - which by that time had become my only real goal.

I'd decided the hell with academia. I lived off my shiny new credit cards, took the State Department exam, passed, and was scheduled for an interview, when the election happened.

I'd thought about what I'd do if Bush won. But I figured I could handle four years of frustration and impotence under Secretary Powell if I had to. Then W fired Powell and started running off at the mouth about his "mandate," and I knew then that there was simply no way in hell I could work for that man.

I didn't have a Plan B.

The credit ran out, I started temping, but despite my two bachelor's degrees, all of my experience had been in manual labor or security, and that's all I knew how to get. I admit, I had unrealistic expectations - I had thought that a diploma was the Golden Ticket (that's what society tells us high school dropouts over and over, but it's my fault for being gullible), but it turned out it just made me overqualified for what I knew how to do, without giving me the key to the executive washroom I'd been expecting.

Yeah, I got bitter. No, it wasn't a stretch.

So back to school. The problem is, there's no field for what I want to do - or at least not one that I know of, which amounts to the same thing.

What originally attracted me to history, oddly, was my (informal) study of Gnosticism. It seemed to me that there were institutional, cultural, and social pressures that warped the original, esoteric, mystical and uncompromising philosophy of early Christianity into the self-righteous, conformist, anti-intellectual forms that we know today. In other words, that the doctrine evolved - not randomly, but in response to specific circumstances and human chracteristics that privileged one (in many ways inferior) ideology over another.

This is kind of a trivial observation, really. But in its implications it points the way to a science of historical causality, and one based on evidence instead of (as with Marx and Toynbee) some preconceived schematic - and one furthermore distinguished from determinism, in the same way that evolutionary biology is nondeterministic.

Nobody studies this except Jared Diamond, who tellingly is not a historian. I could (theoretically) work with him, but I'd have to move to LA. Sprawl freaks me out, though, and I really don't think I could cope with LA.

So that's my quandary. I know what I want my field to be (sociohistorical causality, or whatever), but I have trouble articulating it (no vocabulary), and to the best of my knowledge, the field doesn't even exist.

It's problematic.

Hopefully this meeting will help.