Because majoring in lightning rounds wasn't possible.

I'm KV and I'm majoring in something kind of ridiculous: history.

I should clarify by saying that I don't think it's ridiculous. History has always been a fascinating subject to me. Maybe it's because I always read it like a movie script. Hold the phone, the Aztecs thought Cortes was the god Quetzalcoatl? And he didn't even correct them but instead used their beliefs against them, formed alliances with other native tribes and decimated their empire? This stuff practically writes itself.

However, I'm a firm believer that you can't invest in a future if you don't know your past. History got a lot of things wrong, but it also got a lot of things right. I like knowing where I came from.

The problem with majoring in history is there's no definite job you can do after you graduate. If you're majoring in pre-med, for example, you go on to medical school and eventually become a doctor. Elementary Education majors go on to teach, political science majors go on to be lawyers or judges and philosophy majors go on to do a lot of drugs and read a lot of Hunter S. Thompson. It's just the way the world works.

The majority of history majors go on to teach it. I don't really want to do that. I've spent the last sixteen years in school and the last thing I want to do when I graduate is go back and teach punk-ass kids like myself. I don't care how many blazers with sewn in leather elbow pads I get to wear or how many wine and brie socials are included. No Dead Poets Society in this corner, thank you very much.

To be honest, I don't really know what I want to do after college. And for now I'm cool with that. Maybe it's because I'm naive, apathetic or just blindly buying into the "whatever is meant to happen will" philosophy, but I'm not really worried about it.

What does worry me, however, is the judgement I get from people when this exchange happens:

Stranger: Are you still going to school?
KV: Yeah.
Stranger: What are you majoring in?
KV: History.
Stranger: How neat! Are you planning to teach it?
KV: Not really. Teaching doesn't really interest me.
Stranger:...Well, good luck.

That's neat? Good luck? What the fuck does that mean? Just because I'm not majoring in saving the world or business economics doesn't mean that I'm going to graduate, live in an old refrigerator box beneath the underpass and fight bums for food.

I once had a co-worker tell me that majoring in history was "whimsical". It's not like I'm studying fairy dust or elves; it's history. Past civilizations, cultures and people are not whimsical. The people of yesteryear (actual year between the 3rd and 4th centuries) would rise from the grave and curse the holy hell out of this place if they heard that.

I don't know why having other people judge what I'm studying irks me. Maybe it's because I sometimes feel selfish studying something like history. It's completely self-indulgent, but nothing else interests me as much as it does. So screw it if I don't have a job planned out where I can use it, if I'm going to be paying 20 grand a year for college, it's going to be in a subject that I like.

I figure worse comes to worse, I can make a living traveling the world with a band of gypsies. Or befriend the philosophy students, read a bunch of Kafka and smoke a lot of weed. Win!