Ellora’s Random Column: Get Ready

The other day I was driving back from school with my mind going 100 miles per hour pondering over dilemmas, worries, and possibilities. Most of my thoughts were of future plans, college applications and continual agonizing over whether or not my decisions would be the be-all and end-all of my young life.
As I rounded Bonnie I thought to myself, is this it? It this the decision that I was born to make and live solely for the purpose of making? Is which college I get into going to determine whether or not I end up face down in a gutter with a bottle of Jack Daniels clutched in my hand?
If I think about it, college has been hovering about me wherever I go. Even as a little child my parents cooed to me while fantasizing that I would attend their old college stomping grounds. Today I can’t go a few hours without someone asking me which college I am going to or at least asking me to tick off a few of the prospective schools. Lets not forget the excruciating question that makes my mood deflate like a popped tire: What do you want to do?
As a 17 year old I should I know what I want to do with the rest of my life? I know what I like and what I don’t like, but there is no way that I could drag up an answer that would be in the least bit accurate. It has been my experience that what people end up doing with their lives does not correspond with what they originally thought. Everything that deals with the subject of what I want to do feels so delicate. I’m almost afraid to answer that question for fear of jinxing it. Sometimes I would just like to answer, “Nothing. I plan to do absolutely nothing with my life,” just to offset the pressure.
As I turned right on Errol I started picturing a family of birds, where the chicks get pushed out of the nest so they can learn to fly. There is no real reason that the chicks have to learn to fly. They could just stay in the nest and get fat on worms. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t want to live in the nest forever, or the human equivalent, which is probably the basement. The basement smells funny, for one thing, and for another it must be amazing to fly and use your own wings. I want to have more control over how I begin to stretch them. I just don’t see why everyone has to go about doing it the same way.
Either you get a job, or go to college, end of story. What a boring story! I don’t want to be a sheep that goes along with the rest of the herd. Sure, following the big curly sheep-butt in front of me would be a lot easier than doing more thinking, but there must be other ways of figuring out what I want to do.
As I drove up Coventry I thought, I know people who have plenty of credentials, but who didn’t know a thing about what they wanted to do after they finished school. They only figured it out after living a little. So, it seems backwards that college is suppose to give us all the answers to what we want to do in life, when maybe it is from life that we will learn about ourselves and figure out what we want to study. College isn’t going to be what life is like. I am not going to be living with a roommate in a dorm and eating on a red cafeteria tray when I’m 40.
On the Arlington, I passed a familiar face, a man who was out for his daily 10-mile walk with his beloved dog. Man, I thought, that guy’s going to be devastated when one day soon, his dog will keel over from exhaustion and die. Luckily I caught that thought as it passed through my mind and I realized that it was not something I would usually think. I wondered, why would I think such a thing? It was just because of my bad mood, I realized, not because I suddenly converted to pessimism.
It suddenly occurred to me that my impassioned views on college might be tainted. I saw a bumper sticker once that said, “don’t believe everything you think,” and it could have applied to my present thinking. Perhaps college really is the best way to stretch my wings, and my mind. Maybe the herd of sheep just all happen to be going in the right direction after all.
I still refuse to expect that college will give me the answers that I am looking for, nor am I willing to subject myself to any more required classes. I will spend as much time as I can enjoying the things that I like, and the things that I don’t like, I will avoid like the plague. I know that college will be a part of my life, not the whole part, just a part. College is college, but definitely not life. No matter what decisions I end up making, I will do all that I can to stay out of the gutter. Don’t jinx it.

"This is what happens to me every time I look at my college applications"