So today, in class, I got back a reading response assignment. Included was a glowing review by my professor, in which she wrote, “impressive as always. [Your responses] convince me of how strong you’ll be in grad school!” I don’t write this to brag, although admittedly, my ego was certainly not dissatisfied with this comment. I’m writing about this because, after I’d finished mentally going “hooray I am smrt” and congratulationg myself and all, her comments sparked a chain reaction of thoughts which led to me, now, feeling rather gloomy and anxious about grad school, my career, and my general future in life. How’s that for an overreaction?

I’d been wavering between doing cognitive psych stuff and all that research business, following in the footsteps of Chiaroscuro no less, but that’s been ruled out (no offense, Chiaroscuro!) and I settled happily where I belong, in the English department. Then I’ve been wavering between doing lit crit or creative writing - should I be the author, or the critic that analyzes / contextualizes / mercilessly tears apart said author? I decided to go with the former, after long discussions with professors discussing the various options out their for English majors (you can be poor in a great variety of ways, it turns out).

Well, lately, I’m not so sure about that route anymore. Compounding this sense is the rather prolonged stretch of writer’s block that I’ve been experiencing lately. Well, lately as in this entire past year. If you don’t count workshop classes, in which you’re pretty much forced at gunpoint to write or else you will get a bad grade and no one will love you anymore, that adds another two years. That’s three years of writer’s block, in which I have been not even distinguished enough to be a mere blot upon the surface of the world of artists. Oh, sure, I have plenty of ideas for stories, but the critic in me is a little hyperactive, I think, and shoots down each and every single one by the time I make it to the computer or a notebook to write them down: “Right, your “stranger-witnesses-random-suicide-and-then-angsts -for-five-paragraphs” story is going to be an original and clever hit. Eh, call me back when Jerry Bruckheimer makes another movie.” Yes, that was an actual idea I had for a story, and yes, it was stupid, but it never made it out into the harsh world before being cruelly aborted. Some people apparently do not have a similar bitch-device implanted into their brains, an unfortunate fact. Yet I should at least make it to a first draft, as writers like Anne Lamott suggest, and then be able to mangle and whittle it down to something workable, and eventually, publishable.

In addition to my built-in bitch-critic device (BIBCD? I’ve got to come up with a more acronymable term), there are a host of other things that keep me from writing stories. There’s always papers to write, cats to feed, hats to knit, and sleep to dream. And blogs to update, and templates to tweak. None of these activities, not even the school papers, involves putting myself and my creativity and talent or lack thereof out on display for others to judge, kindly or harshly. So the writing just, well, sort of goes off to the side.

Also pushing me towards going for a more literary-criticism oriented route is the fact that I think I’d be better at it. Especially criticism with a focus on gender, sexuality, and minority issues. I find myself analyzing gender implications in almost everything I read now, and instead of having it kill my enjoyment of literature, it actually enhances it. Cons for going this route: having to read HUGE stacks of literary theory papers all the time (which are of course totally fun and easy to read, right, Hannah?), publish zillions of papers until tenure fun-time, and then teach. I had thought that I would want to teach, but I’m not so sure anymore. Even for college level students. I take class with these people, and usually I end up feeling sorry for the professors. I don’t know if I would really want to put myself in that position. Cons notwithstanding, I really would like to study more criticism.

But then, I got to thinking, do I really want to study literary criticism, or gender and sexuality issues in general, which would be sociology? Women’s studies? Well, if I got into that bit, there’s tons of stuff I am very interested in studying. If I were somehow inclined to take a sixth year of college (which I’m not, at the moment anyhow), one thing I’d do is take some Latin American Studies courses. And some environmental studies courses to boot. Wetland ecology definitely. There’s also an environmental historian here, one of the top in the nation, that specializes in prairie ecology and history. Then from there it’s a whole can of worms, Pandora’s box, insert any trite metaphor here that involves exploding things beyond control, because I’m interested in lots of things. If I specialize in one thing, say, wetland ecology research, that would take time from learning about the conflicts in El Salvador and Guatemala and the role that indigenous women played in resistance to the military juntas. Or learning about chemical and neurotransmitter interactions in treating Parkinson’s disease.

Sooo….I guess that takes me back to square one - creative writing. If I just write about the things that I’m interested in, I can study them all without being too deeply involved in one to be flexible. I won’t have to take ten years of grad school, be dependent on a tenure schedule, unless for some reason, I have a change of heart and want to teach. And that way I won’t have to be a sixth-year senior.

Ahh, I’m so confused. I guess I’ll go back to not-writing, for now.

Back in the 17th century or so, some British merchants decided that they were tired of eating nothing but the same old fish and chips and moldy bread pudding. So they set out in their ships, in search of better-tasting food, and in addition, better-looking women. They sailed east to India, and found, on both accounts, what they were looking for. Not only that, but they discovered a tasty beverage called tea which, in terms of popularity and utility, far surpassed the cholera-infested river water that had heretofore been the national beverage. They kept staying and drinking up all the tea and eating all the pakoras, like rude houseguests, until Gandhi, an upstanding young law student, politely sent the intruders on their merry way. Oh, and a bunch of other stuff happened in the interim that I don’t know much about, because my high school world history class stopped just before the beheading of Louis XVI. I would find about that business much later.

Anyway, the colonization of India is often seen as the hallmark of the British Colonial Empire, mainly because it enabled the flow of tasty foods into a country distinguished by its profound dearth of flavor. The Indians themselves were generally none too happy about the situation, especially Indian men, who got tired of the British merchants swooping in and stealing their wives and daughters - and so there was a bit of resistance here and there. As it turns out though, the best resistance that Indians could have offered was through the food, the very prize itself that the British were after in the first place. The food that, to this day, destroys countless hours of work and productivity of the descendants of colonizers. The food that keeps us coming back for more.

How would the Indian resisters of 1857 known such a thing? That chopping up women and throwing them into wells was in fact unnecessary and a bit superfluous? That all they had to do was set up a giant restaurant, with extended buffet hours, and lace their traditional dishes with cream and butter and tryptophan? That the British soldiers would come in droves and stuff themselves into oblivion? That the soldiers would afterwards be utterly useless in conflict or other colonizing activities? That then the Indians could just chuck them into a well if they liked, or send them back to whence they came from on boats (that is, if the post-buffet weight of the soldiers wasn’t enough to sink them)?

As I type this, even though I am nowhere near being hungry still, and will not be for another twelve hours (after eating lunch at 12:30), my mouth is watering for more chicken tikki masala. Mmm, sweet heavenly colonial revenge.