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i can still taste the air
I am sick of school and the semester isn't half over.
I suppose a direct correlation exists between my sudden distaste and the fact that I have papers to write all weekend, but that's such an easy, obvious out. It's more than that, anyway. I'm tired of *school*. *How* some people do this *and* slap another few years of graduate or law or medical school on to it is beyond my comprehension.
It's not classes, classes are good. Everything I'm taking is interesting, which is unusual but not unwelcome. I like what I'm reading. I don't think I'd even mind the papers, so much, except I just feel pissed every time I contemplate writing one.
It's my bullshit tolerance, I think. The inherent problem of a liberal arts education. I am suddenly hating having to argue and prove and defend one individual point when I am feeling so thoroughly ambivalent towards everything. Learning is wonderful, I like learning. It's the rest of the educational process that I'm rapidly losing patience with. I just want the knowledge, as many perspectives as possible, and then to be left alone to muddle it all out in my head at my own damn pace.
This is burn out, I think. I was told, when I was an overachieving high school student, that it was inevitable. I thought my lack of overachieving in college would stave it off, but I guess not.
-----
What I want, right now, is a life. A grown up life. I want being a grown up to be something tangible and distinctive, some line I can cross and point to and say there, see? But I'm reasonably sure it doesn't work like that.
An actual happy steady job experience did more harm than good, because with my dissatisfaction with school comes a desire for more real work, an actual job. The word "career" does not mean the same thing to me that it does to most insanely driven Smithies, but it no longer inspires terror in my heart, either.
My dreams are so prosaic, it's laughable. But they're real, and they're mine, and they honest, I think. I want a home, a small yellow house with a porch and a garden, somewhere rural and far from cities and suburban decay. I want a rewarding job that pays the bills and I've never wanted wealth and don't imagine ever caring about it. I want a Jeep. I want my children. The little boy I dreamed about - I still can't get over that dream, how real it was, how intense. It's insane and superstitious but I have this certainty now that my first child will be a boy, and I know what he'll look like when he's four years old.
And I want someone to share it with.
The American Dream, right? Is it really so much to ask?
Simplicity makes me happy. Sometimes I wish I were capable of spontaneity, of change and unpredictability and the like. I can handle all of those things, but I don't thrive on them. I thrive on a home, on familiarity, on solitude, on having control of my life. Maybe it means I won't ever have an exciting life, and few people will remember me, and I won't make the world a different place. But it's the only way I know how to stay happy.
I like Wendell Berry. I long to hear his poems read aloud. I wish there was someone who would read poetry to me.
I'm sad.
I suppose a direct correlation exists between my sudden distaste and the fact that I have papers to write all weekend, but that's such an easy, obvious out. It's more than that, anyway. I'm tired of *school*. *How* some people do this *and* slap another few years of graduate or law or medical school on to it is beyond my comprehension.
It's not classes, classes are good. Everything I'm taking is interesting, which is unusual but not unwelcome. I like what I'm reading. I don't think I'd even mind the papers, so much, except I just feel pissed every time I contemplate writing one.
It's my bullshit tolerance, I think. The inherent problem of a liberal arts education. I am suddenly hating having to argue and prove and defend one individual point when I am feeling so thoroughly ambivalent towards everything. Learning is wonderful, I like learning. It's the rest of the educational process that I'm rapidly losing patience with. I just want the knowledge, as many perspectives as possible, and then to be left alone to muddle it all out in my head at my own damn pace.
This is burn out, I think. I was told, when I was an overachieving high school student, that it was inevitable. I thought my lack of overachieving in college would stave it off, but I guess not.
-----
What I want, right now, is a life. A grown up life. I want being a grown up to be something tangible and distinctive, some line I can cross and point to and say there, see? But I'm reasonably sure it doesn't work like that.
An actual happy steady job experience did more harm than good, because with my dissatisfaction with school comes a desire for more real work, an actual job. The word "career" does not mean the same thing to me that it does to most insanely driven Smithies, but it no longer inspires terror in my heart, either.
My dreams are so prosaic, it's laughable. But they're real, and they're mine, and they honest, I think. I want a home, a small yellow house with a porch and a garden, somewhere rural and far from cities and suburban decay. I want a rewarding job that pays the bills and I've never wanted wealth and don't imagine ever caring about it. I want a Jeep. I want my children. The little boy I dreamed about - I still can't get over that dream, how real it was, how intense. It's insane and superstitious but I have this certainty now that my first child will be a boy, and I know what he'll look like when he's four years old.
And I want someone to share it with.
The American Dream, right? Is it really so much to ask?
Simplicity makes me happy. Sometimes I wish I were capable of spontaneity, of change and unpredictability and the like. I can handle all of those things, but I don't thrive on them. I thrive on a home, on familiarity, on solitude, on having control of my life. Maybe it means I won't ever have an exciting life, and few people will remember me, and I won't make the world a different place. But it's the only way I know how to stay happy.
I like Wendell Berry. I long to hear his poems read aloud. I wish there was someone who would read poetry to me.
I'm sad.