Unstuck
Keeping with my long tradition of flying by the seat of my pants, I've successfully set myself on a life-changing path with what occasionally feels like no forethought whatsoever. How did I get here?
Rewind a few months: I'm working once weekly at a job that pays me money, and the rest of the days spent at the mercy of a volatile start-up company. I live with my parents, I'm not making enough to live on my own, and I don't have any friends that live within a 200 mile radius. Life is shit, and at some point I fold and frantically fill out one grad school application to a school in boston.
A week later, I get a call from the biggest PR firm in the world. It's HQ is in St. Louis, and they need a video intern to manage the archive and convert things to WMV. Slowly, things became more OK. I'm getting paid, and my circle of friends essentially doubles from one coworker. If I'd never gotten into Grad school, I'd have gotten an apartment, maybe gotten hired full time, and live out a spectacularly plain life in St. Louis. That's when life started raining "maybes."
Maybe I'll fall in love with Boston and live there. Maybe I'll get an internship for a semester in LA and move to California. Maybe I'll get a real job in the film industry and make movies for a living. Maybe I won't ever move back to the midwest. Maybe real life starts now.
Why Boston anyway? The thing is, I could have applied anywhere. If i'd decided a month earlier, I could have taken the the GRE and applied to all sorts of schools. But that's not what happened. Instead, I applied late, and most other schools were done with applications. Emerson's was late, and they didn't require the GRE for their program. Tuesday I'll be on a plane out to to see the setting of the next three years of my life. In a way, it feels like fate. I'm meeting the wife of my uncle, whom I've never met. He lives in Boston, and I can't help thinking he's just like me. I know when he was younger, he was an artist, a musician. He liked rock climbing and motorcycles. He got into a fight with my grandfather and left without saying goodbye to anyone... Moved to Alaska and told everyone he was an orphan. As isolated as I feel in Chesterfield, I can't help but wonder if I were living in a town that small that I wouldn't have gone crazy and ran away too...
In any case, I'm excited to be coming back to academia. I miss classes, I miss being surrounded by friends every day, and I miss the person that I used to be in school. The latter 3 years aside, my first few years of school were the happiest I've ever had. Everything was new, I didn't have worries, and I never had a moment to be lonely. I wrote poetry. I drank coffee at 11pm. I took classes that had nothing at all to do with my major.
I really hope, with everything left inside me, that someday my adventures lead me back somewhere like that. And I hope by then it won't be too late to find someone to share it with.
Rewind a few months: I'm working once weekly at a job that pays me money, and the rest of the days spent at the mercy of a volatile start-up company. I live with my parents, I'm not making enough to live on my own, and I don't have any friends that live within a 200 mile radius. Life is shit, and at some point I fold and frantically fill out one grad school application to a school in boston.
A week later, I get a call from the biggest PR firm in the world. It's HQ is in St. Louis, and they need a video intern to manage the archive and convert things to WMV. Slowly, things became more OK. I'm getting paid, and my circle of friends essentially doubles from one coworker. If I'd never gotten into Grad school, I'd have gotten an apartment, maybe gotten hired full time, and live out a spectacularly plain life in St. Louis. That's when life started raining "maybes."
Maybe I'll fall in love with Boston and live there. Maybe I'll get an internship for a semester in LA and move to California. Maybe I'll get a real job in the film industry and make movies for a living. Maybe I won't ever move back to the midwest. Maybe real life starts now.
Why Boston anyway? The thing is, I could have applied anywhere. If i'd decided a month earlier, I could have taken the the GRE and applied to all sorts of schools. But that's not what happened. Instead, I applied late, and most other schools were done with applications. Emerson's was late, and they didn't require the GRE for their program. Tuesday I'll be on a plane out to to see the setting of the next three years of my life. In a way, it feels like fate. I'm meeting the wife of my uncle, whom I've never met. He lives in Boston, and I can't help thinking he's just like me. I know when he was younger, he was an artist, a musician. He liked rock climbing and motorcycles. He got into a fight with my grandfather and left without saying goodbye to anyone... Moved to Alaska and told everyone he was an orphan. As isolated as I feel in Chesterfield, I can't help but wonder if I were living in a town that small that I wouldn't have gone crazy and ran away too...
In any case, I'm excited to be coming back to academia. I miss classes, I miss being surrounded by friends every day, and I miss the person that I used to be in school. The latter 3 years aside, my first few years of school were the happiest I've ever had. Everything was new, I didn't have worries, and I never had a moment to be lonely. I wrote poetry. I drank coffee at 11pm. I took classes that had nothing at all to do with my major.
I really hope, with everything left inside me, that someday my adventures lead me back somewhere like that. And I hope by then it won't be too late to find someone to share it with.