Empty and Aching

As a high school junior preparing for college I appear to have reached a crossroads in my life. If I work hard for the next year and a half I'll make it to whatever college I want (tuition not withstanding) and from there I can pursue every intellectual subject under the sun. This, of course, is a favorite topic of adults in my life who would like me to achieve whatever their definition of success is. Parents and grandparents and family friends who truly want me to do well in life often ask me what I plan to do in life, and to be honest it's a fair question. The problem is I have no idea.

Well, that's no completely true. I have some idea. I have binders full of ideas, in fact. That's one of the problems. Paralysis by choice is not something that I expected to have to deal with when I began my search for a career at four years old. I thought it was either baseball player, astronaut, or firefighter and everything else was for boring people with no ambition. But here I am now, not playing baseball or studying astronomy or doing whatever people do to become a firefighter. Instead I'm writing this blog post two weeks late because I procrastinate on everything that doesn't have whatever I consider "meaning" (i.e. serious entertainment value). I, who in pre-k complained to my parents about not being given worksheets and instead being expected to enjoy sandboxes, have completely lost everything that I love about school. As a result the idea of subjecting myself to four more years of "learning"' (seven if I go to grad school) is, frankly, horrifying.

Theoretically school should be something that I thoroughly enjoy. Take poetry, for example. Before last year's english class, my experience with poems was limited to the ones in the margins of New Yorker articles and song lyrics. And I love analyzing lyrics. The name of my blog is a reference to a song. So is, I've just decided, the title of this blog post. But for some reason poetry just didn't click. We read Long Legged Fly by W.B. Yeats and it just didn't connect with me the way Paul Simon and Mark Knopfler could. I quickly became incredibly cynical towards poetry and ruined the whole experience for myself. And then a strange thing happened. Two days after school ended I showed my mom the poetry we had studied. While I was reading Long Legged Fly to her it hit me. Hard. Suddenly I appreciated how beautiful poetry is and how my english teacher could stand to teach it over and over and over again. It was like without the context of an impending quiz or exam or in-class discussion I had the opportunity to let the poem live in a way that could only happen out of genuine curiosity.

So here I am, heading towards the type of dull life that people who aren't baseball players, astronauts, or firefighters live. It is no coincidence that none of the things I'd like to pursue were learned in school. There are a lot of them. History, particularly the way culture has evolved is fascinating to me and it ties in with one of my other interests as well (social science). I also love statistics. This comes as a result of my lifetime of baseball fanaticism and all the Moneyball-types of performance measurements that come along with the National Pasttime. But most of all I want to major in philosophy. There are a multitude of reasons to love a philosophy major in college and exactly one to hate it (finances). If we lived in a communist society or I won the lottery I would totally try to get a job teaching philosophy and publishing my own work at a college. But I'm worried about actually pursuing any of those interests because I am fairly sure that they would be completely ruined by a structured education. Philosophy and Lit is offered at my school as an english elective, and I'd love to learn all about it. But I don't want to make one of my hobbies work. So when I'm asked what I want to do with my life I usually pass it off with a joke like "win the lottery" or "become a rapper", depending on the audience. I just have no idea what in the world wouldn't be ruined by school.

Maybe some day I'll find my "calling" or whatever everyone says you should pursue. Until then I'll be playing Mega Millions.