Also, I'll probably be teaching an enormous course on The Hunchback of Notre Dame in a year's time or so. The other students in my rhetoric course actually asked me to teach a class whilst I was at Berkeley, so I guess that's going to be the first one.
I'm picking that work because I know it so well, and I'd like to teach another course or two while I'm here. That will just be the trial run. I've already found my first two books on cathedral architecture, and I'll probably be doing cheap translations of Japanese doujinshi over the internet/tutoring/beta-reading/trying to sell short stories in an effort to make the pocket change for a really nice student's Bible and another French dictionary. As for why I'm not just getting a job like a normal person, I don't need that much money or that much responsibility, and I'll have plenty of time to get grungy work once I've graduated from Berkeley >_>
Realizing that I don't want to decide now whether or not I'll go into mathematics as a career--and thinking that I'd probably rather not--has made me much, much more interested in studying it and doing well in the subject. Kind of funny when that happens, huh?
The reasons behind that are complex, but they mostly amount down to "if I went into mathematics, I would need to devote myself so fully to it that there would be nothing else." I don't think that studying mathematics alone will make me wise, and I don't think studying only the humanities would either. So, I will study both, and maybe from that incestuous union I'll be able to come up with something interesting and different.
Frankly, I think hyper-specialization would destroy what I've built. Maybe that's just wishful thinking, but I don't know. I tend to think that I work pretty hard, even when I'm theoretically playing. No matter what I'm doing, I'm always thinking about how I can do it better, and what I can see in other areas. I'm always looking for new insights and new things to learn.
So, I don't know. If this works--or if it doesn't work--I'm just going to try. In a world with so many hydras, who am I to throw away my extra swords?