I have a new job. I don’t hate it yet.

At my new job, and also in a brief conversation with Steven Pinker post-lecture, I became self-conscious about reference to my college education. Not any sort of bourgeois guilt, just confusion in terms of how to refer to it. To say “oh, I have a degree in English” makes the degree some sort of mark of prestige. When I speak of “my degree” with respect to a book list I was compiling at work, my giddy joy over corny irregular verb puns, or the fact that I have read through Infinite Jest more than once while Pinker just “looked through it to find [his] name”, I am not trying to exert any sort of authority over the other people, just trying to explain my predilections. No one would think it elitist for me to say that while they may not have enjoyed Larger than Life, I thought it was a fun movie, perhaps owing to me being a Bill Murray fan. But when you get things like “degrees” involved I worry that any mention of it becomes a dick-waving content. Kind of like me mentioning how I talked to Steven Pinker tonight. But if I really wanted to engage in a dick waving contest I’d mention how Ian and Jessica and I got photographed for Seed’s adorable little “science socialite” photo page, or whatever they call it. This is not about the waving of dicks, this is a sincere inquiry into social mores.

So, with these concerns in mind, my solution when talking to Pinker was to instead say that “I was an English major”, which seemed to sate his curiosity as to how I got through Infinite Jest not once, not twice, but thrice. It was only after the fact that I realized that by saying “I was an English major” that I may be opening myself up for the assumption that I dropped out of college before attaining a degree. Which shouldn’t really be something that I lose sleep over, that some of my co-workers and a world-renowned professor of cognitive science might surmise that I am a dropout. But it does bother me.

Speaking of lost sleep, I took a taxi up to my car this evening. It did make me feel quite bourgeois, but it was only about four dollars more than taking the subway, and it afforded me the opportunity to write this entry, and still get a whopping four hours of sleep tonight. I’d probably still be on the road right now if it weren’t for that taxi.