A two-faceted attraction to the humanities
Oh no - graduate school! I was revising a paper about how everything bad (but also good I guess) in today's world is basically traceable to Romanticism. I had the thought, "I want this to be real" - I mean, if I could see, all the time, in a tangible, incontestable way, how "intellectual history" - bold, fascinating theses (as mine clearly are) - formed all that is around me, manifested as my very life, as the world.
This is embarassing: male humanities majors are attractive because it is compelling and touching to witness someone invest a lot of skill, wit, energy into something they aren't sure is real, or I'm not sure is real - the combination of vulnerability and, uh, subtle, turned-on-itself, strength that we all love (female humanities majors, literature and especially art history majors are typically not attractive [unless they have fairly explicit gender issues of some kind], for the same reason - a lot of them have the attitude that makes one suspect they just need to take up embroidery or something [I am, uh, talking about undergraduates here]); furthermore: I want to be such a type because I want to be attractive, but also because I identify with it - with the vulnerability-and-strength thing - that’s what it is to be attractive, right - to “become more like yourself." So anyway it is still my belief that people do things initially out of vanity, take what they think they are and form it into something more dignified, something I should probably... not talk about in my "statement of purpose."
UPDATE: I think the male humanities majors do have to be not sure it's real, and perhaps also somehow be trying to address the fact that they're not sure it's real (and not just by self-righteous whining), to be attractive. Otherwise they become like caricature Hemingway protagonists (people like that usually also love Hemingway), really annoyingly masculine.
This is embarassing: male humanities majors are attractive because it is compelling and touching to witness someone invest a lot of skill, wit, energy into something they aren't sure is real, or I'm not sure is real - the combination of vulnerability and, uh, subtle, turned-on-itself, strength that we all love (female humanities majors, literature and especially art history majors are typically not attractive [unless they have fairly explicit gender issues of some kind], for the same reason - a lot of them have the attitude that makes one suspect they just need to take up embroidery or something [I am, uh, talking about undergraduates here]); furthermore: I want to be such a type because I want to be attractive, but also because I identify with it - with the vulnerability-and-strength thing - that’s what it is to be attractive, right - to “become more like yourself." So anyway it is still my belief that people do things initially out of vanity, take what they think they are and form it into something more dignified, something I should probably... not talk about in my "statement of purpose."
UPDATE: I think the male humanities majors do have to be not sure it's real, and perhaps also somehow be trying to address the fact that they're not sure it's real (and not just by self-righteous whining), to be attractive. Otherwise they become like caricature Hemingway protagonists (people like that usually also love Hemingway), really annoyingly masculine.