I am having just a bit of a crisis here.
Have you ever had this terrible feeling every so often that you're wasting your life in some huge, enormous, egregious fashion?
Have you ever had the equally terrible feeling that maybe you're doing the wrong thing with yourself?
...I looked at the EALC (East Asian Languages and Cultures) pages to see whether it would be feasible to take on a second major. Needless to say, it wouldn't, since I don't have a lot of money and I'm not young anymore, so I don't have the time it would require. Samurai are one thing, and pissing away money which I feel would be better spent on my cultural heritage is another. The samurai are cyclical: they come, they go. It's like my thing for Norse mythology: it comes, it goes. Classics has always been with me. Classics will always be with me. Classics is what I love.
All of this feels like very cold comfort. Some of it, I'm sure, is related to the fact that I am essentially a smug bastard who would like to feel better than all the other undergrads in the Japanese department because I'd be learning the language and the culture for reasons not pertinent to anime.
It's kind of nice to know that that's not an option, though. Maybe someday I'll go back to it, but I don't think so. Classics is what I really want: that's what ninety percent of my leisure reading revolves around, anyway. By contrast, I'm so gonzo about samurai that I wouldn't be a very serious scholar; I can't explain samurai to someone else the way I can explain Rome, the way I can talk about historiography. I can't even explain why I like Japan in a coherent way, whereas I can explain classics perfectly: it is the simple liberating truth of my culture revealed.
I still feel a little disappointed, though.
Have you ever had the equally terrible feeling that maybe you're doing the wrong thing with yourself?
...I looked at the EALC (East Asian Languages and Cultures) pages to see whether it would be feasible to take on a second major. Needless to say, it wouldn't, since I don't have a lot of money and I'm not young anymore, so I don't have the time it would require. Samurai are one thing, and pissing away money which I feel would be better spent on my cultural heritage is another. The samurai are cyclical: they come, they go. It's like my thing for Norse mythology: it comes, it goes. Classics has always been with me. Classics will always be with me. Classics is what I love.
All of this feels like very cold comfort. Some of it, I'm sure, is related to the fact that I am essentially a smug bastard who would like to feel better than all the other undergrads in the Japanese department because I'd be learning the language and the culture for reasons not pertinent to anime.
It's kind of nice to know that that's not an option, though. Maybe someday I'll go back to it, but I don't think so. Classics is what I really want: that's what ninety percent of my leisure reading revolves around, anyway. By contrast, I'm so gonzo about samurai that I wouldn't be a very serious scholar; I can't explain samurai to someone else the way I can explain Rome, the way I can talk about historiography. I can't even explain why I like Japan in a coherent way, whereas I can explain classics perfectly: it is the simple liberating truth of my culture revealed.
I still feel a little disappointed, though.