Dear Mr. Stevenson,

It's Jade, the annoying little philosophy student you had in junior year. I don't know if you remember me, but you're the only one I know who might understand what I'm feeling. Honestly, I'm in a crisis. I just finished my first semester, second year. I decided to major in magic. It was against the wishes of my parents, obviously. And like, 5 years ago it would have sent me to the psych ward to say something like that to a student councilor.

It was the most interesting thing I had ever heard when we discovered that second layer to our reality that allowed for continuity and causality to be paused for the benefit of consciousness. It sounds so exciting, right?! It's been postulated that if we could only prove that certain illogical things in the universe had to be caused by magic, then we could prove the existence of intelligent life in the cosmos! Many of these illogical things are older than earth itself, so we couldn't have been the ones to make them. I just love the concept of it so much. But that's all I love about it.

You see, science has pressured all sorts of equations onto magic. The bachelor's degree is literally a B.S. in the Science of Magic. I'm not a math person, you know that. I just wanted to live a little. I mean, who in their right mind refuses to become a magician when it's offered? But it's all the rigor and analysis... It feels like whenever chalk hits the blackboard, magic leaves the room. I feel like it's supposed to be more intuitive than this.

I tried talking to my therapist about it and she took everything I said and somehow made it about my career prospects in the industry. She said "Well, if you feel this way you should change majors now..." And since when did the humanities become so... utilitarian? Like, I want to know why I feel the way I feel, not be told to change careers. Who the hell wants to give up studying Magic to study Literature?

You told me about somebody. A Kafka or someone who felt like a cog in an infinite machine where all the joy in life was chopped up and packed away in an infinitely progressing filing cabinet of forms and econometrics. I just feel like the most basic wonder of my childhood fantasy was killed with curriculum. I feel betrayed. This stuff is so hard to do, and I just know we're doing it wrong, but... That's just it. The scientists who discovered it obviously didn't think so. And entire institutions of logic I can't even begin to understand, apparently. And they're all way smarter than me. So that just leaves me here alone. Wrong. Again.

Maybe I should just stick to Lit. Or maybe what I really want is to just be a kid again and dream. Do you think magic could do that for me?

Sincerely, Jade Whitmer, some girl who's grown sick of this B.S.