Erving Goffman


Sociology is frustrating again. I kind of accidentally enrolled in a graduate-level sociology course on Culture, Identity, and Interaction. For the first 15 minutes of class when I started realizing what I had gotten myself into, I was panicking. However, the professor is amazing and hilarious (and wrote one of our texts for the class: Peacocks, Chameleons, Centaurs: Gay Suburbia and the Grammar of Social Identity) and all of the articles we read are super-interesting sounding. Oh, and did I mention that we have to write a 25-35 page publishable Sociological research?

But all that is not what is frustrating. I feel like I can't really grasp sociology or take it seriously because it has no boundaries to thought. It seems ridiculous. During the class discussion, twice someone said "Does this even really matter? It's all socially constructed anyway." What? Maybe we should decide whether what we're putting time into actually matters before coming to class.

I feel like I'm just not getting something. I began to appreciate what I study so much more after coming back from L'Abri. Maybe I'll go read over my notes again from that semester and hopefuly recapture whatever that was.

But, all that aside, grad students are hilarious. They're definitely a different breed than undergrad. All of them smoke and have some kind of counter-culture marker on them (boxed-in tatoos are the most popular, along with various piercings).

...After thinking about it for awhile, I think what L'Abri gave me was the ability to hold my own beliefs loosely in favor of finding out what reality actually is, not spending energy on forming arguments in my mind while the professor is speaking about postmodernism like it's a good idea. This is extremely hard.