Monday, October 27, 2003
Seriously.
I worked with one of the newer employees tonight -- she's been here for a few weeks, but since she normally works during the day I haven't seen her much at all. She's a pretty good co-worker, from this evening's experience. As is usual with co-workers when I close with them for the first time, she went through the round of introduction questions -- where're you from, what are you majoring in, and so forth. Then she asked me if I was planning on attending grad school.
"I don't know," I said honestly.
She laughed and gave me a look that made me guess she must be thinking something along the lines of, You poor, naive little schoolie -- no idea how the real world works! Then she said, "Art and English means you should be getting graduate degrees! You'll be a professional student."
You know, it's one thing for me to make fun of the fact that my future will most likely involve years of school, and then continued years of teaching in a school for a less-than-stellar salary. It's quite another thing when someone else points this out to me. It's a little disheartening to be told that I'm spending so much time, effort, money, and energy pursuing something that won't really get me anywhere. At the same time, I have another knee-jerk reaction to the assumption that I positively must go to grad school and/or if I want to do anything with my degrees. I think, Well, how exactly do you know that I won't write a novel or live as an artist or find a career in editing or something like that? And then I return those thoughts to the back of my mind and resign myself to the fact that I will probably be a student barista for a few more years to come.
Considering the future of both my career life and personal life usually scares me, so I don't like to do it often. But I sat in on an interesting chat the other night that made me feel a bit more hopeful about one thing. Ostensibly it was a large chat about writing romance, but it touched on a lot of topics that had more to do with real life than fiction. Rebecca said something which gave me a bit of food for thought, and others concurred with the opinion; she said that her brother had once explained that there are two types of girls: those you take seriously, and those you don't. And the girls you take seriously are "off-limits" until some commitment can be made. Not that I'm implying that this must be true of all men, but it sure does make a lot of sense for my experiences. Since the time I was thirteen to the present day, all my romantic interests have been my friends, and all have resulted in some sort of rejection. I've always said that I don't need a relationship to validate my worth as an individual, and I stand by that -- but being an utter failure at developing a relationship gets kind of tiresome. It's much nicer to think that I'm just the girl who is to be taken seriously, rather than the girl who isn't good enough. And it's easier to believe that eventually, there will be someone who wants to take me seriously.
| 12:24 AM |
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Who am I? I'm a twenty-two-
