Future brings visions of doom and damnation

I’m feeling an impending sense of doom lately. My friends are graduating, and I am staying here another year. My goal to graduate while I’m still in my 20s is looking bleak. Not too bleak, but I’m not what you’d call an optimist.

Next year, I complete the University Studies program (which is what’s keeping me here), and I’m doing it on my terms. I’ll be damned if I take courses outside of my discipline. I’m paying for my education, and I don’t have extra money to waste on frivolous classes.

I’ve also recognized the uselessness of having a bachelor’s degree in today’s economy, especially one in history. I have no interest in teaching, as I think all high-schoolers should receive mandatory spankings and hormone therapy, and small children would be scared by the kind of history I’d teach them. Therefore, in the grand tradition of many males in my family, I’m off to law school.

I’m campaigning for a large grant from my father to pay for a test-prep course. I must take the LSAT and with my mediocre grades, a good LSAT score is imperative. I wish I’d come up with the Kaplan program. Those bastards make a lot of money off scared students like me.

If I had my druthers, I’d quit school now and become a travel writer, but you need some sort of capital to finance your travels. To date, I have enough capital to keep me in beer for the weekend.

Besides, the only other language I speak is German, and they don’t have sunny beaches there. Germany’s exchange rate is not as favorable to the poor 20-something’s budget as, say, Thailand’s is.

So for now, I’m stuck in a circle of studenthood. After next year, I’m going to take a year off before the pain and degradation of law school. I’ll visit those cheap, sunny beaches in Thailand and not think about a future of bill paying and long hours in the office.

The future is a scary tunnel to look down. Even if you have goals (concrete ones at that!), mustering the energy to carry them through to completion requires a lot of energy. Goals also imply a finality.

After college, even after law school, I won’t be able to pop off to Canada for a weekend, or sleep late on weekdays. It’s looking like I’ll probably have a husband, and with that will come dogs and perhaps, children. The last one will require lots of soul searching. I’m not one of those women who needs to have children to feel her life is fulfilled. I rather like to think of my future as being like Amanda Bonner (Katherine Hepburn) in Adam’s Rib.

She had a husband, was a successful attorney, had a nice house (two of them actually), dogs and no children. She was a happy woman who liked her life. Children are frightening. They require a lot of responsibility, and that shouldn’t be taken lightly. There are plenty of people in this world who are unfit parents, but they have truckloads of children.

I don’t have to think about any of that now. I have a year to go. One more year of pub crawls, beer busts and all nighters (not the studying kind either). If I don’t think about it, it’ll go away, right? Of course, perhaps that’s why it’s taken me so long to finish college in the first place.