Soy un perdedor (actually perdedora for gender agreement, but I don't speak Spanish so what do I care?)

If you have no interest in Loser Domi's personal life, please stop reading now. Better yet, just read one of the past posts over again. This one's pretty good, as are this and this one.

(Shirt image stolen from http://ex-it.com.ar/novedades/?cat=3 which, for some reason, came up when I Googled "Soy un perdedor".)

I'll be honest--I started out my university career as a French major. At one point, I used to love it. Now, I'm terribly disillusioned with it--every French course I have to go to is a chore, almost an endurance test. I haven't been happy with the major since at least halfway though last school year.

While I've known that I must switch out of French, the main problem I've had/am having is the question of what area to switch to. I mean, it seems like a waste of time for me to switch to a major if I'm just going to end up becoming disillusioned with that as well. After lots of reflection and quite a few late-night marathon chats with close people, here's the game plan for me:

I'll go from a Major in French to a Major in Sociology with a minor in French. I'm only one course away from the French minor, so I might as well snap that up--it looks good on paper. Plus, during my first year and a half I took 4 sociology courses, so it's not like I'm jumping into something completely unknown. Hell, one of the professors thinks I'm some sort of genius and she still says hi whenever I see her around campus even though I haven't had a class of hers in almost three years. Plus sociology just sounds important; much more so than French. It seems interesting enough as a field of study and it may me marginally more applicable in the working world than French would be (although considering the best I’ll probably have to look forward to is some sort of meaningless office job, neither is really applicable.)

One of the best parts is that I’ll never again have to be put onstage at parties. Usually when I tell people that I am a French major, they ask me to speak French, which is annoying as all Hell. Is that normal, to ask someone to perform his or her major? If you’re an accounting major, I don’t ask you to count to ten without using your fingers, do I? Also, I won’t have the assumption that I will be a teacher and I won’t have to explain how much I hate the kids I would be teaching.

I’ll share a little story—when I was in high school my older sister graduated from her university and came back to my school to teach introductory French and Spanish. I still marvel at the fact that she didn’t end up smacking some of those kids (middle and high school aged) around—I had seen them in action and they were little self-centered monsters. Then again, my sister is much more patient with other people than I can ever hoe to be (besides, she isn’t teaching any more.) People talk about how rewarding it is to teach, but I don’t really see the reward. All I see is a bunch of outside work—reading papers, making quizzes and such—and the kids end up not respecting you. I try to keep that in mind whenever I bitch about writing a paper—I’m just glad that I don’t have to mark 30+ of the damn things.

At this point, I’m not sure where I’m going, either with my path or with this post. But, what I do know is that I am going somewhere. Does that still count for anything?