My life is boring. There is no other way to spin it. I almost never go to bed after 10PM and I like to wake up at 6AM to watch the news on “Morning Joe” on MSNBC. Sounds exciting. Right? I eat scrambled eggs and toast for breakfast, bundle myself up in the puffiest articles of clothing I can find, and head out to my 9AM Modern French Theatre class. Maria is a clerk at the Einstein’s Bagels in the basement of Arts and Sciences. She serves my coffee every morning at 8:45 as we complain about the Boston weather and yearn for the warmth of our native countries (hers is the Dominican Republic, mine, Venezuela). I take four literature courses, so after class my day is pretty much consumed by reading, reading, and more reading. Some days I go out for a run (only if it’s above 30 degrees!), and if I’m feeling very rebellious, I agree to my friends’ pleas of dropping my books and going out to dinner. The times I do give in to the lures of a cheesy spinach dip and a conversation about something other than the implications of the social commentary embedded in a fictional character’s sustained glance, I feel guilty that I’m not at home meditating on these implications.
This is the conflict that almost every college student faces—the balancing of academics with a social life, endeavoring to maintain one’s sanity in the process. Unfortunately for the students of literature, this task is arguably more difficult because of the universally applicable nature of their studies. How can I not be reminded of the post-revolutionary American fear of the individual mind as my chip divides a portion of the spinach from its unity with the dip? Is there not an inevitable parallel between my friend Cristi’s fascination with Heidi Montag’s ten consecutive plastic surgeries and 18th century British society’s obsession with criminal celebrities?
So you see, there is no escape from the life of literary analysis, because every single incident, commentary, and action is pertinent to literature and has probably been the subject of some literary work. Not that there’s anything wrong with that; it’s actually quite exciting. Honestly, how many people can come up with the topic of their term paper from a bite of a delicious spinach dip (I recommend Houston’s, by the way)? I’d argue that only literature students have this ability and this privilege.
On the other hand, being reminded of a novel’s tensions and issues in the midst of a purely entertaining conversation also has its shortcomings. It’s not like my friends want to hear about the genius way in which Richardson depicts the fluctuating emotions of his characters through the technique of epistolary fiction. I mean, I might submit them to one or two lamentations on the pitiable fate of the protagonist in Richardson’s Clarissa, but they usually want to shove a burger in my mouth if my literary ramblings continue beyond that point. Not that my friends are averse to any sort of intellectual conversation, but if they started lecturing me on the cyclical tendencies of the Bull markets (clearly, I have no idea what I’m talking about), I would probably have a similarly negative response.
Sadly, there is no solution to the conflict. I’m not going to discontinue my study of literature because it hovers in my thoughts as I pour the milk in my coffee—that’s actually one of the reasons why it fascinates me. But I’m also not going to stop myself from interrupting a riveting conversation about Snookie’s drunken scene on the first episode of “Jersey Shore” to note the interesting parallel with Pap’s drunken rambling in Huckleberry Finn.
So yes, my life is boring on a superficial level—repetitive days, endless reading, and then more thinking about the reading when I have the opportunity to think about something else. But honestly, the morning news would be so boring if these analogies weren’t running through my mind; my leisurely run would just be painful, and Heidi Montag would simply
be a waste of my time. Thank God for parallels.
