Usually, I don’t make New Year’s Resolutions. I could never keep them, and I’ve yet to meet anyone else who could. That and they never really seemed that special to me.
But this year, I am making a New Year’s resolution. I’m resolving not to think about the future any farther ahead than this summer. Beyond that, I’m not going to think about it.
This might seem like a really irresponsible resolution, but I really think that it’s for the good of my sanity. As a junior in college, I’m constantly being asked what I want to do when I graduate. Professors ask me about it all the time. My friends are always talking about looking for jobs next year or applying to graduate school. They all seem to have their lives figured out, and I really don’t, and it drives me nuts.
I could go to graduate school, and in many ways, that’s what I’d really like to do. I always feel lame when I say this, but I love learning things. I love researching. And then I love writing about what I’ve learned. Sure, it’s grueling. Sometimes it can be tedious. But in the end, it also feels very satisfying. In many ways, I could see myself as a professor somewhere teaching classes and writing books and never leaving the safe haven of a university. Of course, this is a very idealized vision of a professor’s life. In reality, I know that I’d spend a lot of my time fighting for funding and lecturing to students who really don’t give a damn about the cultural significance of literature or the meaning of poetry. I also know that a lot of what I wrote would be read by other academics…and it wouldn’t go much further than that. In the end, I sometimes wonder if I would have just amassed immense quanities of knowledge for myself without doing anything useful or beneficial with that knowledge. Still, I’ve only got one life to live, and if learning makes me happy, I might as well spend my life doing just that. After all, there are certainly worse things that I could do with my existence.
On the other hand, I’d really like financial independence. I love my family, I really do, but I’ve been mooching off them long enough, and I feel embarassed whenever I have to ask for money. If I got a job right out of college, I could (hopefully) get my own place and a car. I could also get a guinea pig. (It sounds like an absurd dream, owning a guinea pig, but I’ve had three of the little furballs ever since I was five, and my last guinea pig died about a year ago. I haven’t bothered to replace him because, being a college student, I’m not in a good position to have pets, but I’m so used to having a guinea pig that I miss my old one.) I also want to have some fun with my life, though I’m not exactly sure what that means. I guess it means not coming home and breaking out the books for the rest of the evening and spending the night curled up with some sort of Norton Anthology of Literature. I guess it means being able to go out and have a few drinks without thinking, “Shouldn’t I be drafting a paper right now?” I guess it means having time to get involved in things that aren’t related to homework. If I got a job right out of college, I could do these things. If I went to graduate school, I’d come out with mountains of debt. Of course, I’d like to get a job that I would enjoy and find meaningful too.
So, right now, I’m stuck between wanting to go to graduate school and wanting to get a job as soon as I get my B. A., and I can’t make up my mind. Most of the time, I just end up feeling worthless and depressed because, unlike my peers, I don’t seem to have any pratical and useful plan that will guide the course of my life. And this is where this summer comes in. This summer, I’d like to get some sort of writing internship. It’s a good plan either way, because it will give me some praticial experience in the job world and it will also look good on a grad school application. Also, if I spend the summer interning and find out that I like it, I’ll probably end up deciding to work right out of college. If I hate interning and spend the entire summer wishing I was back at school, then I’ll know that I’ll probably be better off going to grad school. But until then, there’s really no point in making up my mind one way or the other.
So, New Year’s Resolution: Prepare for this summer, but don’t worry about what’s going to come after it.
Life as a Cup of Coffee 