Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Some Tips On Finding You

"Some tips on finding you" is accompanied by a "tinyURL" on someone's Twitter feed. I am on-purpose not clicking on the URL, no matter how big it is. I feel like no one's tips for finding "me" (or "you," for that matter) could possibly measure up to the one-million-and-one directions in which my mind is now racing. 

Is this meant literally or metaphorically (in the sense of finding oneself)?

I don't know if I'm lost, or if I just haven't quite gotten the point of all this nonsense yet. And by nonsense, of course, I mean life. Maybe the "me" that is lost is the part that doesn't know yet what I'm going to do with my life. Today, in the cafeteria, I told my friend I was thinking about picking up a 2nd major in African studies. He, practical pre-med student that he is, looked at me for a second and said "and then...?"

"Then," I said, "grad school."
He shook his head at me, of course I'd be going to grad school, whoever wouldn't? 
"No, I mean, then what? After grad school?"

Gosh, what a large question to be posed by someone the exact same age as me. I mean, I guess if someone is pre-med they obviously have a much higher ratio(right word? I don't know.) of plan-to-commitment. I'm an English major. I read. I write. I pretty much live in my imagination all of the time and, occasionally, I live in someone else's. If I could get paid based only on the AMOUNT of books I read, I'd be perfectly happy. And also, perfectly rich. 

Anyway, my long-term plan is to be happy. That's it. I assume, perhaps naively, that if I'm happy, everything else (money, relationships, career, etc) will fall into place. Right now, I can think of at least 10 life-plans that would make me indescribably happy if I should happen to just fall into them. None of them involve saving lives or curing diseases, but they all involve interacting with and affecting people on a daily basis. 

I want to keep reading, keep writing (get better at it, for sure), do some acting (because if I don't, I think I'll go crazy), open a shop, live in Europe, have a life. That's all. I want time and money to not have to worry about either of them. I want to be a complete person with a full life---I want to continue to be myself. 


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