Growing up.

It's confusing, growing up is
The abundance of choices and
the fear of making the wrong one.
The tremors of possibility mixed with
the inconstancy of desire.

I have been thinking a very great deal lately about college. And things that have to happen before college. And things that I want (or deciding what I want) to happen after college. I've been thinking about growing up. Once upon a time, I had everything figured out. Most people wait until their freshman year at college before their plan falls apart. I didn't. The plan.... psh, gone. Toast. History.

The plan was to become an engineer. Nothing wrong with that, it's as good as anything else. Honestly, I'm not sure why I'm not so attracted to that idea any more, but I've become disenchanted with it. It seems ironic, but I think that it was doing FRC that really made me decide that my future wasn't set in stone, that I didn't have to become an engineer. It's ironic because, like, 80% of FRC alumni go on to become engineers of some kind. So it's weird that the very program that I got into - expecting to come out an engineer - turned me into something else. The fact that NCFCA was simultaneously waking me up to the world around me probably helped that along. But now I don't think I want to be an engineer. But what do I want?

I want to be creative. I'm not an artist, but I'd like to be one. I would like to be an author... but not a journalist. Not enough to study it. One of the things that first drew me towards engineering was the fact that I liked building with LEGO. I created, I sculpted, and - once upon a time - I dreamed of being a set designer for the LEGO company. That could still be the dream, except I want more than that.

I want to contribute something. My life has all been about me, about what I can get, and I know that that is juvenile and has to change. I want to give something back to the world, I want to use my talents to make the world bigger, to let light shine, to see change and be an agent of change. I want whatever I do to be bigger than paper pushing. In some ways, I'm not very ambitious. I don't care about big houses or cars or even food (the poorest people in the world live on rice. I like rice.) But, in other ways, I'm incredibly ambitious. I care (or want to care) about real love, about ending poverty and hunger and injustice. I don't want to be a cynic.

Sometimes I wish that I could be a professional musician, but that's just idle dreaming.
Sometimes I wish that I could become a poet, but I want to help people before I'm dead.

I think I'd like to be a teacher. Teachers affect their students in tangible ways, and they see the change they produce. A good teacher, an inspiring teacher, can do more to determine a young person's outlook than pretty much anything else. And unlike being an engineer, it's a day job that I could care about, knowing that I'm contributing something.

It's confusing, growing up is.