Meanderings on Next Year and the Problems Therein

Because of my recent obsession with surveys and such, I feel that today I should give you a really heartfelt, philosophical, deep and rather disturbing bit of questioning meat to digest. I have just the thing to discuss: career day. Yes, ladies and gentleman, today is that wonderful day of the year when regular idealistic college kids trade in their hopes and dreams and learn that they too can work for an insurance agency (and in their black suits and tight pencil skirts, they look so cute, you wouldn't think that they were selling out!). Of course, yours truly did not take part in the festivities. Instead, I dawned the cloak of loser-dom (actually it was just my denim jacket) and hiked across campus to attend classes about books, classes that, of course, will never help me in the "real world." But I indeed saw the detritus of the career fair: a very uptight girl in my English class in a black pant suit and silver cross pendant who looked at me disdainfully when I said I wasn't going, two Jewish-looking guys in new black suits, comparing the new leather folders their parents just bought them for their resumes, a girl in an outfit that my fifth grade teacher would have thought was too old, talking on a cell phone about her "prospects." In short, I saw my fellow students playing a very elaborate game of dress up. It was depressing, but also very fitting. We, as a class, as a generation even, are supposed to make these decisions now. It's time. We are supposed to put on the business suits and the fake smiles and look "professional" because hark! The real world is calling.

And then, here I am. I am choosing to remain the impudent child who still refuses to believe that she can't fly. I am telling everyone I want to be a writer, hell, that I AM going to be a writer and thus have no need for afforementioned suit or smile or tightly pulled chignon. I, for the first time in my life, have no idea where I will be at this time next year, or what I'll be doing for that matter. I might be making coffee in New Jersey. I might be editing in Wisconsin. I might be in flipping Berkeley, CA, selling pizzas out of the back of a truck. And why are you going to these places, you ask? I am following my boyfriend there, like a good woman should. Me, the girl who has written every last term paper, every last response paper, every last whatever on feminism and women's sexuality is choosing to follow a man cross country, to be the vigilant woman while higher degrees are attained and such. Instead of making a decision on my own, I am going to follow him. It's not that I don't want to. I mean, I do. But it is scary. Very scary. Does this even make sense?

Which brings me to the subject of graduate school. Grad school, the very thing I should be thinking about right now as an answer to my quandry, is suddenly a bit less attractive. Why, you ask? Because grad school suddenly seems to be "in vogue." Everyone is doing it. Everyone is taking the GRE's, everyone is talking about "reach schools" and "safety schools". Case in point: I was talking about our Alexander Pope reading to one of my friends in a class, and this girl who I have never heard speak except for a few indiscernable grunts directly related to her stance on the rugby team starts talking about how Pope is important to know for grad school. My afforementioned friend (who I thought was in the School of Ed) starts talking about how she has to know him because he is on the GRE subject test. They continue to talk about these things as if they are compatriots in a foreign war, and I am some idiot who burned her draft card. Now mind you that these are not the most, shall I say it?, intelligent people in the world. These are not your future Rhodes scholars or anything. Further, I refuse to believe that these people even halfway care about the things they are studying. In short, they are not doing it because of an undying love for literary theory, rather, they suddenly recognize that grad school is the ideal thing to do if you are not ready to grow up. In fact, it is the antithesis to the world of career fairs and such, in that, it is still this liminal phase where you are kinda this and kinda that without having a whole foot in anything. Do you see where I'm going?

But the one thing that grad school and the career fair world have in common is that they are both a form of control in an otherwise chaotic and frightening world. If one knows that he or she is involved in either thing (grad school or career), they don't have to worry about the motives of their actions, or about how they are going to pay the rent or about any of the other things that currently divide and conquer my psyche. Right now, I am experiencing the full chaos that life has to offer as far as existential meanderings go. The thing is, I'm not unhappy. It is nice mulling these things around in my mind, and knowing that, at least for the time being, I am able to do that. Come next September, maybe not, but right now, it's cool.

So that's the thought I'll leave you with. I think we should all mull in our thoughts, and think about the complete and utter chaos of the world. The uncertainty. It's cool to think about, and hey, it keeps you from watching another show on VH1. Just think about that.