This was supposed to be the year I gorged myself on literary theory, grew fat on subjectivity, exploded under the intensity of my thought and the splattered everyone around me with ideas that would change their worlds.
Yes. This was the year I would put finishing touches on The Plan. The one that would Change The World. A major part of this plan was my application to grad studies. I had vague ideas of what I wanted to study; they involved ethereal words like diaspora, identity, and youth. Their very vagueness ensured their ethereality. I was able to spin intricate webs with those thin connections, was able to see potential in everything.

Now here I am. A month on, I use the phrase “brave new world” and think not of swans (or even zips) but of cracks.

When I was in Life Sci and fervently wishing I wasn’t, I was acutely sensitive of the ways in which intelligence in the Sciences (at least at the undergraduate level) is constructed. It involves the ability to unfailingly identify the phalanxes of the fingers, string together molecules into recognisable compounds, tweak formulas to fit the hypotheses parading as truth. I thought nostalgically of Physics and Calculus, my mainstays of logic, now put behind me as I progressed to the increasingly cut-and-dry material of upper year pre-medicine. I made it point to take a math course every year, but neither Statistics nor Epidemiology measured up to Calculus’ romanticism, its unfailing belief in the unknowable: the infinitesimally minute and the infinitely large. It was poetry in numbers, the way we moved in small steps from the mundanely numerable to quantities incalculable. It was theory parading as practise and I rejoiced in it, the way we spoke so casually of things we could never really, never properly describe.

The Statistics I took in second year, though taught by a man whose love for the course was genuine and overwhelming, was so obviously tailored for Life Science students that it left me with a bad taste in my mouth. Epidemiology, a year later, when it deigned to provide social relevance was somewhat but not much better.

And you see, this is it; this is why I have sat here for over an hour today, trying to explain why I am increasingly frustrated in my efforts to define what it is I want to study in graduate school: I cannot speak of Literature, and not speak of Mathematics, just as I could not, a year ago, study Locke and not think of Linnaeus. Interdisciplinarity, touted now in the Social Sciences as the new wave, is my way of life. Yet right now it is vogue enough that a historian may also be a linguist. And how can I settle for that? I want to get high on words and on numbers, in print and on the Internet. How can we define any one thing until we have known all others? And yet the halls fill every year with Life Scis content to become doctors who have never dabbled in the social sciences. And the English department swells with students who have never considered that atoms are perhaps the world’s best metaphor for everything.

So here I am. Free to be English. Free to become the professor I wanted to be, and I am floundering.

A friend, a Philosopher major, English minor, and lawyer hopeful, once remarked, “People say English is subjective. But it’s not. There are rules, you know.”
I felt she was trying to defend English to me and was silent, because I vehemently disagreed.
English is subjective. I know this, after having hijacked over three years’ worth of class discussions, as fact. Anything, once articulated, is legitimated. All that remains is to pass off your argument with enough bravado that everyone else is persuaded.

But I need the literalness of Anatomy to rail against, the logic of Physics to ground me, the painstaking heartlessness of Organic Chemistry to restrict me. I need these things because they define my boundaries and there can be no such thing as interdisciplinarity unless there are disciplines.
And I am and can be nothing if not interdisciplinary.

Which is really just another word for confused.

But also perpetually awestruck.

Update:
I was re-reading this post and thought: What a horrible, horrible, oh utterly horrible opening paragraph.
Oh well, you live and you learn. My apologies for making you endure that horror of a metaphor.