Most of my life, I have had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t know anything about colleges, so I just applied to the ones I had heard about—Ivies and such. This other college wrote me and asked me to apply. I had never heard of it. But I decided to apply to it as my safe school. I didn’t get into any of the other schools, and I ended up going to my “safe” school, which turned out to be a well-respected school. What did I know?
When I graduated from college, I think I had this idea that a job would just fall in my lap. It didn’t. So I flailed around for a while at various low-paying jobs that had to do with my political interests. I learned a lot doing these jobs—and not things I ever expected to learn.
I decided to go to grad school, practically on a whim. I applied to the best grad school in the nation in this field, as well as one other university. This time I got in. But I still had little clue about what grad school was about. I didn’t take it all that seriously. I mean, I did well enough in terms of grades, but I didn’t do any networking, and I didn’t get hooked up with the group I should have gotten hooked up with because I never knew they existed. I’d done no homework.
So I graduated without a job again, and just wandered to Philadelphia because my girlfriend wanted to go there. I eventually got a job kind of in my field by random networking. And the rest of my career has been much the same. Pretty random.
Along the way I discovered I was infertile and I was certifiably crazy. I dealt with it as best I could. I never really had any goals because I believed that if I had goals, I wouldn’t achieve them, so it was just better to wander through life.
I’m not sure this is the best way to live, but it is a way to live. It’s not exactly fire fighting, because I do have general goals—children, happiness, travel, education, teaching, making friends, being loved. But for me, life is like one of those super-waves. They come out of a perfect storm of some kind and there I am, riding that wave because I have no other choice.
We’ve got rats. The pest control person says we need to fill up the holes in the basement. So that’s what we’re doing—using the money that was supposed to paint the kitchen or put insulation in the attic. We’ll only do a corner of the basement. To do the whole thing, which we should, costs 24 grand. Yikes! We’re going to get more estimates.
We have general directions we want to go in (my wife and I). Where we actually go and how we actually get there is an utter mystery to me. I’m pretty clueless. I’d love to be a writer (i.e., make a living writing), but maybe that will happen and maybe it won’t. I’ll keep on doing writing like I do here, just because it’s practice in case anything should ever come my way.
Like I say, this may not be the best way to live. Still, I think one could do worse. I have very vague, generalized ideas about what I want to do. I wanted to be a writer in college, and I managed to get one or two poems published, I’m still working on it without actually working on it, if that makes any sense.
Maybe you can deal with your problems as they come at you. You might have ideas about what you want, but maybe aren’t attached to them so much it’ll really bother you if you don’t achieve them. Or maybe you develop a detailed plan with interim steps and goals. What matters is that you do what makes you comfortable, not what someone else thinks you should do. It’s your life to do what you will with. There are no rules. You do what you decide to do in response to the circumstances you find yourself in.
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