Pig Snob
My undergrad will come to a close in around 3 months. It feels weird, like a circus clown going corporate, leaving his small-fry town behind for something better — but still something unknown. The clown has fallen in love with his next chapter. At least he hopes it is love. The clown comparison doesn’t feel out of place, I like the comparison. It keeps me humble, keeps me fresh. Keeps me down. I like that it keeps me down.
I’m probably the luckiest person who’s gone through the Communication program here at SFU. I think about it a lot. More than I probably should. Merit has always been something tough to wrestle with on a personal level. I don’t believe that hard work in of itself leads to success in the world. Everyone needs that one chance, one shot, one lucky lucky thing to happen to them. And this lucky thing only happens if one is ready to pounce on it, if one recognizes what the opportunity could lead to. Mine came from the old CMNS Faculty Rep talking to me about taking over his post after a game of Futsal where my assisting was better than my shooting (more cause my finishing leaves a lot to be desired in the composure department). He had a confidence I admired, and weeks of occasional chit-chat led to him giving me a chance to direct the course of my life in a way I had no idea. Luck came to a meritless man. And the meritless man was desperate to get out of the circus. The look in his eyes was beginning to seem too similar to the caged animals of the show.
I had to run in an election against some frat guy, which was publically humiliating to a degree I still don’t think I recovered from. There’s a reason why the role has changed now, no one should go through a humiliation trial met with ambivalence and awkwardness by the student body, and met with a faux type of be-the-change-you-want-to-see from the SFSS. But the results came in and I won. May 2022 marked an upward bump on what was a consistent average straight line on my undergraphduate axis.
My life would have probably fallen back beneath the upward bump if I had stayed in CMNS 332: Communication and Rhetoric. It is not as if the content itself was bad — anything but. But I swapped a week late into Dr. Siyuan Yin’s CMNS 310: Media and Modernity. And then CMNS 487: Migration and Media with her a term after. And then I started my Honours under her, which came to an end on April 22nd, after a week of unhealthy working habits came to tie the bow on a project I was incredibly proud of. I had 3 presentations/conferences where I talked about my Honours in the span of 10 days, each one was tinged with a feeling that was farewell-esque. Like a graduation ceremony scored by Joy Division. Last month felt like a conclusion to right now’s appendix.
A bit dramatic, I know. I just keep thinking about how lucky I was. Somehow decisions that spun this path for me worked out incredibly. I’m starting my Masters here at SFU Communication in the Fall. That sentence feels so weird to write, and a little narcissistic, too. I won’t repost this blog post on the CMNSU Instagram for that reason. Not that many people read the blogs as far as I know (unless you’re star writer Tati Rasco!! who is my favourite of all the people I’ve been so lucky to hire for the club, even if one has been growing on me a lot more over the past few months), I’ll hide the most genuine blog in the unadvertised depths of our Squarespace.
I like the idea of writing it as a time capsule for myself to cringe back on in 1-5 years. At least I hope I’ll cringe at myself, I better find critiques in some of these snobbish and delirious statements written in half ironic jest and half genuine seriousness since March. My biggest hope is that one student, just one, sees that there’s more to the program than what the student body thinks of it as. This is a top 3 school in the country, top 20 in the world for Communication. And to think most students still add an s to the end of its name. I think the entry requirements are too low to give the students who receive their acceptance letter any self-esteem in the program they’re in. It’s why the IB kids seem to be the ones most up to the challenge. They hate themselves to a degree that they’ll work hard and self-sacrifice as it’s an ingrained behavior un-wrenchable from their life.
There is a palpable, vitalizing aura here that I find enticing to an addicting degree. I see it fill the school, making itself seen and expressed from TA to faculty. It’s not hard to feel moved or as part of a greater whole, even at my lowest linked undergraduate level. I don’t know if every undergrad sees it, in fact, I’ve never been able to really reckon with the fact that so many don’t, but it's clearly there. It's isolating on occasion how this thing I clearly see makes me feel, this feeling of really being proud and enamoured by the work and faculty one can learn from here. I’ve felt across the various roles I’ve had at the undergraduate level that the majority of Communication students are very much unknowingly in need of a moment of self-actualization. That ennui of uncertainty and unhappiness makes itself felt, it gets expressed in ambivalence or insecurity, even if the body and mind can’t properly articulate it.
It’s been my goal after being handed the keys to the CMNSU to make that ideological shift of the student union back to Communication, no longer embodying a widespread internalized undergrad understanding of Communication as a faux-business BeedieLite™—students who haven’t shaken off the neoliberal feeling of being temporarily embarrassed billionaires, pursuing happiness and desire in all the unsatisfying Lacanian ways. I’m well aware that solving that problem is a tide that no undergraduate student is even capable of making a visible dent in. But the small impacts here and there have been incredibly meaningful. I wonder if it’ll last. I wonder if it even started outside of myself.
How did it even start for me? How is it gonna end for me. The Pig Snob fuses with the meritless man, and what is left is more questions. I think I’m onto something with my planned research focus. I wonder how that thought will age in a term or two. Let’s see if the new graduate environment will make me sink or swim. I’d like to just keep my head above water if I can, I’m just worried that’ll be the most I can strive to, barely surviving.
Am I any happier now? I think so. I’d like to say I think so. It avoids the no that always tries to slip out first. The no which always comes to mind first. I occasionally ask the people in my life that question, and I feel a kinship not in their eventual response (which tends to lean more towards a yeah than a yes), but in the flurry of activity and doubt that appears on their face while formulating an answer. I don’t know what to think of it. Is it the pig snob wanting someone else to be as miserable as him, or is he hoping to be pulled out of the trough by a female farmer with a sunburnt smile. I sometimes find myself too easily magnetized towards those sunburnt smiles, after one I’ve been lucky to see reciprocally, gets extinguished. A fire I put out myself, I'm like a fireman who gets post-rescue clarity; I should have poured less water. Should have saved it for someone else instead.
I’m excited for this next part of my life, can’t wait to get 100s of emails asking why I gave their ChatGPT’ed essays 0s. Or being visibly depressed and dejected, as the students in my tutorial sink into their phones spamming the class discord with bro fr tweaking, bro really expected us to do the reading. But I honestly can’t wait, I’m lucky that it gets to be me. I’ve wanted nothing more than the chance to move my way up. I’m 22! I'm gonna live forever.
As I was completing my master’s application, I was reading Stoner by John Williams. The feeling it put in me was intense, more than I was capable of handling.
“But don’t you know, Mr. Stoner?” Sloane asked. “Don’t you understand about yourself yet? You’re going to be a teacher.” Suddenly Sloane seemed very distant, and the walls of the office receded. Stoner felt himself suspended in the wide air, and he heard his voice ask, “Are you sure?” “I’m sure,” Sloane said softly. “How can you tell? How can you be sure?” “It’s love, Mr. Stoner,” Sloane said cheerfully. “You are in love. It’s as simple as that.”
I was so overwhelmed at the chance that I would not get to continue studying what I’ve fallen in love with these last few years. I refreshed my admissions page every day.
On the second week of April there was a School Meeting that I attended to introduce the new CMNSU president. I kept looking at the agenda to see if the Graduate program attached any information. Around an hour and a half in, it was their turn to speak, and I thought it was over. The words confirmed, sent out, official, were spoken. I did my honours presentation an hour later, in a somber tone as people that came out packed themselves into the somber room. Tinged with a sort of sadness I think, I hope my recalling of it is more dreary than it was. After my too-long presentation was over, I asked the director of the program if that was it for the grad admissions. I think he immediately picked up the cause of my dejectness, and asked me to talk to the graduate advisor. Returning from the washroom I find out from one of my club members that the advisor had stopped by looking for me. I went up to his office thinking of that scene. And as I sat down in his office, suddenly everything seemed so distant. The walls of the office receded, I felt myself suspended in the wide air, and I heard the words I yearned to hear.
My love would not be unrequited. The Pig Snob gets his chance at love.
