Who's the real turkey on Thanksgiving?

For most Americans, Thanksgiving is supposed to be a time of rest and relaxation. I thought that it would be for me, too. Last week, I could not wait to get home. I was counting down until I would get to enjoy almost of full week free of stress.

Unfortunately, a week without stress was not in my future. A fact which became painfully clear to me very early in the day this Thanksgiving. As soon as my coat came off, I was assailed by that question dreaded by every college senior, with the notable exception, of course, of those two or three people (please let me believe that it cannot be more than that) in your graduating class who have jobs at this point in the year and are smug enough to talk about them: So, what is it that you are going to do next year?

Now, I am willing to concede that this is a reasonable question to ask someone who will be graduating. The problem is, at this point in the year, most of us don't know. Most of us don't know what we are doing next week. That is acceptable...or so I thought. It is only when questioning enters the realm of the "real world" that its unacceptable not to have an answer. Then, not knowing somehow becomes evidence that you lack direction or ambition, that you're irresponsible or ill-suited for the future.

The reality is that I know what I want to do next year, but that is no guarantee that I will be doing it. There are interviews and applications that I have to contend with, and it is a process that takes time.

There's another issue here, too. The post-graduation-plans question seems to be the first question on everyone else's mind and, consequently, the first thing that they ask about. By the end of Thanksgiving dinner, I had fielded the question about 25 times. The only people who did not ask me about my future plans were my parents, who, thankfully, took the day off, and the one-and-a-half year old, although I suspect that he would have asked, had he been able to formulate full sentences.

By the third time I fielded the questions, I was tempted to start telling my family members that I was going into plastics. But, I was not sure that they would realize that I was alluding to The Graduate, and not informing them of my brilliant career choice. I was sure that my cousins, just slightly older than me, would think the latter since none of us were alive for the initial release of the film.

A friend of mine, who followed a pre-med sequence, once told me that I was lucky, my English major provided me with ready-made dinner party conversation. Right now, I will not attempt to enumerate the reasons why English (and history, and art history, and philosophy etc.) is a legitimate academic subject because there is a certain degree of truth to what she said. If all else fails, I can hold a good conversation with someone about books and movies because I've studied them. I would venture to guess that there are a scant few social settings in which a physics or math major can get into a conversations about quarks or non-Euclidean geometry.

There is, however, one thing that my counterparts in the physics and math departments have over me. Employability. Same with engineers. None of them may have ready-made conversation topics, but they can all talk about the jobs that they have been offered. As for me, I'll be at my next family function hoping to avoid any questions about my future by discussing books and movies.

Hilary Tisman is a senior majoring in English