don’t ever tell your boss you studied literature in college,
lest you find yourself writing marketing material
for every email campaign,
for every google and/or facebook ad,
for every product description on the website,
along with every blog post talking about how great the company culture is,
and how other people, other candidates,
should come, follow us down this winding path of job choices,
don’t ever tell your boss you studied literature,
lest you want to become the unpaid copywriter
that gets to tell coworkers when they ask for your help,
‘oh, i’m sorry, i can’t help, i have to write this real quick ad campaign for the boss,
they said they need it by the end of business today,
so i can’t delay’,
never delay, never delay,
don’t ask for my help,
for i’m the token english major writing away
don’t even tell your friends or family that you studied literature,
because then they’ll ask you why,
and comment on how you took on so much student loan debt,
for what? they’ll ask,
to be able to read shakespeare and sylvia plath?
it won’t matter when you tell them that you received enough scholarships
to cover your college tuition, and so you don’t actually have student loan debt,
because then they will tell you that you wasted
the scholarship money on a meaningless degree that will never amount to anything,
and how you should have studied business or engineering,
or anything that would lead to a well-paying career,
and when you tell them that you didn’t really care about money when you were younger,
that you still don’t really care about money even as an adult,
or at least that you don’t care about money in the capacity of wanting to accumulate a whole bunch of it, but rather,
you’re satisfied so long as all your means are met, like food, water, and shelter,
with one or two streaming service here and there,
you will still get the occasional familial sigh of disapproval from all your uncles,
the sharp tsk-tsk from aunts at family events,
and the weekly phone calls from your parents asking if you’ve gone bankrupt yet,
and they’re always surprised, somehow, when you tell them,
‘no, i’m not a homeless former english major living on the side on the road,
while trying to write the next great american novel,
because i realize my strengths and weaknesses as a writer,
and i’m not an author, i’m the guy that edits coworkers emails,
and writes all the marketing material for whatever company i work for at the time,’
don’t ever tell anyone you studied literature,
because then you’re liable to write a stupid poem about
how everyone either expects you to write for them without any extra compensation,
or they worry about your future
and how you could have been a lawyer, doctor, or engineer,
if you’d only studied something, anything, else other than the written word
Fred Aiken Writing 