Photographing!
It'll be a few more weeks before there's any significant change, though, so I'll just wait it out.
The only downside to the fall is that it means that before too, too long, I'm going to have to bust out the space heater, since my apartment is neither heated nor air conditioned. I've had the window in my bathroom perpetually opened for the last couple of months, but I almost froze this morning, so I had to close it. Maybe if I just wear layers around the house, I can avoid plugging in the heater and paying ridiculous electricity bills. Maybe by the time I actually need a lot of heat, I'll have moved to Asheville and will be in a centrally-heated and air conditioned apartment.
(Please?)
So, I have a Professor Friend from my college days that I keep in touch with and who I e-mail sometimes. I know he reads (or, at some time or another, read) my musings here, so he'll be getting this same spiel twice.
I'd e-mailed him telling him about my current situation, how I hate my life in this job, etc. He's been telling me for months now that what I need to do is go back to school, teach, etc. Following is my manifesto of why I will not be going back to school or teaching. I've said it before, but I have several very compelling reasons why that is not an option for me. (Actually, no. I should never say never. These are my reasons why I will not do this RIGHT NOW.)
#1. I don't want to teach
I think that's a pretty good reason in and of itself. Yes, I did, at one point, want to teach. The reason I have this (fairly useless) English degree is because I had a roommate my sophomore year of college (around that time when you're supposed to be choosing a major) that was in the Teaching Fellows program, and she suggested it. I'd recently decided to drop the Broadcasting and Cinema major (dropped because I found that in order to get the the concentration I really wanted [Media Writing], I'd have to take all these classes on lighting and sound and all that broadcasting stuff, and I just really didn't care for it.) and I needed something else. So I decided that being an English teacher made sense, for some reason. I also had a brief "I want to teach!" moment right after graduation, but that, I think, was due to people telling me for years I should do it and being unable to find a full-time job.
There are several reasons why that didn't stick, and why I ended up as a plain old English major. My college didn't even have any interesting concentrations within the English major. You know, journalism, creative writing, literature, etc.? If you were an English major, you were either going to teach or you studied literature. Which I did. Had there been a writing concentration, I would have opted for that, but as it stood, the only writing concentration was within the B&C major, and I've already been through that.
I know you should never choose a profession just for the money (obviously I didn't), but I know that teachers make not-so-good money for a lot of work. I'm doing that now, and maybe it's because the newspaper industry isn't my Dream Vocation, but I really can't see doing that. Getting paid not much for a lot of work. It's not like I've been dreaming my whole life of teaching. Maybe if I had, it would be a different story. But the only thing I've been dreaming of being my entire life is someone who is so important, they require their own assistant. You can definitely tell the teachers who want to be teaching and the ones who are doing it because they have to. Which brings me to my next point. . .
#2. I do not want to teach college kids
I was, in the very recent past, a college student, so I know how they are. Some of them are truly there because they want to learn, because they want to have a particular career, etc. Some of them (like me) are there because they don't think they're going to be able
to get a job if they don't have a degree or they just don't know what else to do. And then some of them are there for the sole reason of partying and spending their parents' money. I know for a fact that many, many college freshmen fit into the second and third categories, and I also know that, as a grad student, those would be the ones I would be teaching. The freshman-level classes. I have no interest whatsoever in standing up in front of a bunch of idiots (because, really, that's what freshmen are. I don't care who you are; as a freshman, you're an idiot.) who are only there because they're fulfilling a General Education requirement. That, I feel, would be spirit-killing. I already have a jo
b that does that, and I don't have to pay for it. Which brings me to point number 3. . .#3. I'm in enough debt as it is
Grad school costs money. I don't care how much financial aid you can get. . .eventually, you're going to have to pay it off. I am currently up to my ears and the ears of several other really tall people in college debt. College, where I didn't actually want to go in the first place (the aforementioned not knowing what I wanted to do). I'm going to be paying for this for probably the rest of my life, and, due to mistaking bills for notices, my credit score has suffered as a result. Truly, I don't want to add thousands and thousands more dollars to my already substantial debt.
And, finally, #4
#4. I didn't like school
If I have to be honest, I'd have to say that I stopped liking school around my freshman year of high school. I just didn't like it. I didn't like going, and I didn't like learning (or "learning") things that would, no matter what they told you, have absolutely no bearing on the rest of your life. Chemistry? No. AP Statistics? No. AP Environmental Science? No. English, I always liked, because I'm an English-liking person. Band was cool up until my senior year when I figured out that it wasn't talent, but politics that ruled there. French? I was an epic failure at French, even though I love, love, LOVE the language and desperately wish I could speak it. And that was just high school.
Once I got to college, there were those damn General Education requirements you HAD to fulfill. Basically, you had to take classes from certain categories that those in command decided you had to be adept in to make you a more well-rounded person. Sure, there were electives, but those were few and far between. And then there were the major requirements. I'm still trying to figure out why, as an English major, I was required to take British Authors: Medieval to Neoclassical.
WHY is this required? All I want to do it write, man. I don't want to read poetry and analyze things. It all seems really pointless to me. I remember one requirement was ENG 303. . .something about literary criticism. WHY? All I know is that analyzing literature is maybe one of my least favorite school-related things to do EVER, and I had to take an entire class on it. Do I remember anything from that class? No, I do not. I remember how hard it was and how impossible the textbook was to understand. Why is this required of me as an English major? I have no idea. I think they assume that everyone in the English major, whether they know it or not, is going to teach, so they make you learn how to torture other people (your students) making them analyze what Fitzgerald meant by the green light at the end of the dock or why Scout was dressed as a ham. (It was a ham, wasn't it?)
Maybe Fitzgerald just really liked the color green and Lee was Jewish and not allowed to have ham, thus developing a fixation on it. I really don't know. But I don't see why it should matter.
Point being, I don't want to go back to school because it would most certainly require that I take a bunch of classes that I will find useless and pointless and uninteresting. Would I like to take some classes as a nearby college? Absolutely. I'd love to take some photography classes or writing classes, or maybe even a painting class. But do I want an entire, strict curriculum, telling me what I absolutely have to study in order to succeed as a (fill in the blank with a job title here)? No. No, I don't.
So there you have four very compelling reasons why, despite being stuck in a job I dislike, I will not be quitting in order to go back to school. I'm not going to put myself through that when, truly, I have no drive for it. I'm driven to succeed, and I want to make something of myself, but I don't know what that something is yet, and I don't want to force myself back into academia just to find that I've wasted time, money, and sanity on it.
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