Unbelievable... except... not at all.

So I'm racking my brain trying to decide in which direction to move in the future with my studies---in particular because I'd like to start writing papers from that scope as soon as possible and I've got one due in a few weeks---and I start to think about things I would like to study and write about. I recently watched Scotland, PA for my Shakespeare in film class and it really resonated  with me because it's this cool, working-class retelling of Macbeth that just so happens to be set in the 70s which, so far as I can tell, looked like an awesome time to be alive. My experience with this movie reminded me of a similar experience I had while reading an excerpt from Alfred Lubrano's book Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams. In this excerpt, Lubrano described how he grew up in a working-class family in New York, and how that has affected him in his life as an academic today. It was the first thing I'd read discussing the working-class in academia, and it really fired me up.

So I'm thinking about what these two things had in common and I'm left with this: the working-class. The class which I'm proud to be a part of and that consists of all the people with whom I grew up with and most of the people that I've become close friends with and the people who I want to stay in touch with regardless of how much we have in common because there's one unspoken and unseen bond that is just there and always will be.

I want to study and write about the working-class in literature.

So I started to do a little research to see where this kind of study was going on so I could read some stuff to get my feet wet, and guess what the first freaking page that pops up is? This. Yup. Fucking YSU. Unbelievable... except... not at all.

So I do a little more research and find this. Yup. Pittsburgh. Not even a little surprised. Not sure why this never occurred to me in all my months/years of soul-searching, but it's been a pretty wild trip and I wouldn't trade it.

Who says we're not all products of our environment? Thank god for that.

Here goes nothin'.