Are we Bluffing or Paleoprofitiering?

You know how, when you are a kid, all job possibilities are open to you? You fight with your friends over who is shopping and who is the shop keeper? And then later, you finally work in retail and before long the ding on the cash register makes you want to poke your eyes out? And then you get older and you rule out things like cowboy because riding on a horse all day seems glamorous but is really about lots of poop, mud and infrequent showering. Or astronaut, not because you are not smart enough (although, secretly, you have your doubts) but because the void of space seems claustrophobic from the isolation it brings. Plus astronauts in the movies are always floating away screaming into the abyss or having their face sucked out of their helmet. So you start narrowing your career opportunities to jobs where your feet stay on the ground and pressurized-oxygenated helmets are not required. Some would call this old age, I prefer maturity.

I seem to have gone through some sort of regression (I prefer this term to mid-life crisis) lately, thinking the whole world is still full of opportunities for me and I embarked on getting my Masters in English. Having received two Bachelor’s degrees, I thought it was about time to prove my brains and move up the intellectual food chain. At first, things seemed to be going well. I got an A- on my first assignment. Then I got the dreaded B (for me this is panic time) and of course I went running (yes, literally running) down the hall, waving the essay in my hand at the teacher. “What did I DO?” I asked. She had stated beside the grade that I had failed to include an annotated bibliography. This confused me because she wrote this on the page that I had titled “Bibliography”. She graciously stopped mid step (during a break in class) to explain annotated meant actually annotated. I needed a summary of my sources under each source. Whoops. It turns out most of my English degree was earned by taking Creative Writing and Screen And Media classes so I assumed ‘annotated’ was a metaphor. Or a fancy way of saying list…

Next, I had to do a presentation on Primo Levi’s If This Is A Man. Harrowing reading but plenty of things to ponder and discuss. My copy of the book looks like a kindergarten craft project, with all the little pink Post-Its flagging out the side. I had my outline and had started putting together my Power Point, but then I thought I’d better make an appointment to see the teacher, to make sure that “presentation” wasn’t just a fancy way of saying lecture…

I entered her office and laid out for her the main points in my presentation. Silence filled the room. She rubbed over her eyes the weary hand of a person who spends her days trying to pass on knowledge to deadpan faces and then proceeded to tell me gently and with excellent teaching skills where I had gone utterly wrong. This would have been great, seeing as I still had time (about an hour between soccer and laundry and dinner and “Mom look at this mine craft thing!”) to work on it before class but the professor began to speak another language. Well I am pretty sure it was English it was just all the words in the dictionary I had never heard of. There were entire sentences where I didn’t recognize a single word she was saying (I am pretty sure she didn’t even use a, an, or the). At first I just sat there staring but kept my face shaped in an “I’m listening and pondering” look (you know: crinkled forehead, leaning forward in my chair, chin on hand, finger tapping lips.) Then I thought, this is probably really important. So I began frantically scribbling these foreign words, spelling them based on how they sounded. Then our time was up. She wished me good luck and sent me on my way. The problem became evident when the only word I could find on Google was pedagogical; which I had managed a close enough spelling that Google worked it out for me. Unfortunately, none of the other words were recognized so I had to do my presentation without considering these important points; points such as Paranthenanialism,  prescriptionalinasetion, or irony which I knew how to spell but I had trouble defining because I really do think Alanis Morrisette’s song is ironic. So whenever I go to define it in my head, I think of a guy taking his first flight and the plane crashing and I am confused. (You may think I reference this song a lot and you would be right. It bothers me more than a little… although I will admit it is on my mind way too much.) In the end I showed a clip from The Office. You may be thinking, not really WWII related and I would agree but I needed to be reminded that it’s okay to laugh. I then launched into my actual presentation, sweat pouring from my armpits (Which I considered when picking my shirt in the morning but thought, Hey that is what “anti-perspirant” is for. Apparently the deodorant was scared of my presentation too and ran away. So my thin, light blue shirt looked like I had dipped my armpits in grey paint.) When I was finished one of the other students asked me “What was your point exactly?” To which I replied “Ummm I didn’t really have one…” thinking, maybe I should not be getting my Masters. But then, after a moment, I said “But I think that is what Primo Levi wanted. He wanted us to consider his book not just make a point about it.” Which at the time seemed a little weak, like, I was bluffing. But then I thought, that’s what has been bugging me all along: everyone seems to be bluffing all of the time or maybe not bluffing but getting all caught up in words like paleoprofitiering. And I don’t really care to second guess what the author is saying every other sentence. I want to get into the story. To taste the metaphors. To have the lessons that can only be learned through a story burrow into my heart making me better. Not to dissect every sentence saying, “this is what the author really meant.” I think the author may have meant what he spent hours and hours trying to get exactly right on the page. He analyzed and rewrote every sentence over and over till it said exactly what he wanted it to say. Or maybe he just slapped something amazing down and then said, “Gee I hope some English Master’s class figures out what I am trying to say here because I have no idea!”  Perhaps I should go back to science where the words all make sense. Words like, ventral striatum and locus coeruleus which, come to think of it, I still can’t pronounce. Alright, forget it. Will everyone please just Share or Repost or whatever it is kids do these days so I can have a real job writing? Because it looks like I will never make it as a scholar and my window for remembering Latin is slamming shut.

(P.S. I say, “Whatever it is kids do these days” because a fellow student informed me the other day that “Facebook is for old people…” I laughed and agreed and then cried in my car… Apparently maturity is not quite the right word.)