Perhaps I should say a little bit more about meself.
I recently graduated with a BA in Slavic Languages and Literature (Russian concentration). And there are of course several questions that nip at the heels of that information.
Q: Are you Russian?
A: No. Did someone say you had to go to college to study your own ethnicity? But I have occasionally been told I look Russian.
Q: What made you want to study that?
A: There are a handful of reasons, all of them true, which I give depending on my mood. One is that I had a teacher in high school who was from Ukraine, who got me started learning the alphabet. Another is that I read a National Geographic article on Pushkin from 1992, and began to realize the enormity of the historical context in which I (born in 1983) was living. Another big one is that I read the Brothers Karamazov for the first time when I was 13 (and 10+ times since then, including in the original), and it, much as I hate to write this cliche, changed my life.
Q: Have you been to Russia?
A: Painfully, no. This is the greatest shame of my life. I realize most people ask it only to make polite conversation, and certainly are expecting an affirmative answer, which they can follow with more polite inquiries and maybe a request for vodka. But I haven't been (yet). Main reasons why will have to be detailed later.
Q: What are you going to do with a degree in that?
A: I'll have to get back to you on that one. I always thought I wanted to go the PhD route so I could be the eccentric Russian lit professor who gets all dreamy-eyed talking about Andrei Bolkonsky, but mercilessly fails students for using Cliffs Notes. But I see now that academia isn't quite all it's cracked up to be. I'm attracted to the writing and research and teaching, but not the whole political side to it.
And you can blame the economy, or the decadent modern society with no room for intelligentsia, or just my high-ish standards, but it's damn hard finding a job with "just" a BA, a humanities BA at that. Ideally I'd like something that could afford me opportunities to use the languages I've worked so hard to acquire (Russian, Polish), but as my massive debt looms larger, I will be content with something that pays the bills and doesnt' suck all the life out of me.
So if you're reading this, and you know of anything, I will pay you a finder's fee of… a link on my other, more popular blog (wouldn't you like to know what that is…).
