WHEN I TELL PEOPLE MY MAJORS — English and music composition — I usually get some kind of question that generally goes something like “Well what are you going to do with that?â€Â

I tell them: I’m going to keep going to school until somebody gives me a job. That response usually provokes some kind of laugh and a smirk and a whole bunch of nonsense about what it means to live in “the real world.â€Â

There are only a few things in this world that irritate me more than questions like this, and most of things are on Fox News.

It’s as if these people are unwilling to accept a job as being part of the “realâ€Â world if it doesn’t involve working from 9 to 5, five days a week. As if somebody — and by somebody, I mean me — cannot make a meaningful contribution to this world if they don’t work a job that makes them miserable.

For me, and for many, many of the employees on this campus, things like research, reading, writing and thinking are not just a waste of time.

They are significant, inasmuch as they contribute to the areas that we care about, the areas that we deem significant in training those people who plan on entering the “realâ€Â world.

I am not — and we are not — merely trying to shirk responsibility or escape the demands of a more conventional lifestyle.

I don’t need to work in a bank, in a giant corporation or in your “real world.â€Â

I̢۪m already there.