Adventures

I just catapulted my phone off my desk and into the wall. Not a cell phone either. An old school plugged into the wall phone with a spiral cord and everything. Maybe I should not be awake. Anyway.

I’m listening to “Don’t Worry About Me” from Joey Ramone’s posthumous album with the same name. It talks a lot about being fine and yet not quite fine. That’s how my summer is going. In some ways great, and in other ways strange and confusing. This is my last big vacation before I get chucked out into the real world, which is sort of laughable. Me, suddenly in charge of every aspect of an adult life? They don’t make training wheels for this.

And they shouldn’t. It’s just weird, because for the first time in my life I don’t have a clear picture of what will happen next year. After 20 odd years in a highly structured pattern, it’s like stepping off an elevator into thin air. There’s no stop at the next level, no name tags and piles of assignments waiting to be picked up. There is only space that I have to conform to whatever career path I find. “Career” is an awful word sometimes. It sounds like a sentence. I don’t want to walk out of the elevator and onto a moving walkway, watching the world go by as I stand there with my skirt and briefcase. Yikes.

I hate skirts. More than that I hate the idea of giving up all the promise and possibility that was described to me as a child just to make enough money to get by. I know it’s a privileged sort of dilemma. I should be glad of the choice I have when so many people can chose between only violent death and a refugee camp. I just hate the way this world can easily crush hopes and dreams. What happened to doing what you love, rather than doing what will make you the most money? If I live in my hometown again after college it won’t be for many years. Even with a good job I couldn’t afford it. So I might as well forget it. I’ll get a job that lets me chase some crazy dreams and see what happens.

Fittingly my shuffle just switched over to “Live Before You Die” by Social Distortion. I couldn’t have said it better myself.