A 7:55 Kind of Day

One Sunday morning last spring I woke up at 7:55 to a text message from my choir director asking why I wasn’t at church warming up with the high school bell choir. Answer: I am not actually in the high school bell choir and I had no idea that I was expected to play with them that morning. Nevertheless, I bolted out of bed and by 8:15 I was at church with bells in my hands. Then, once I was there, I was weaseled into playing with them at a concert that afternoon as well. What was supposed to be a nice relaxing Sunday (practically an oxymoron in my world) turned into a busy day of rehearsals and performing. I didn’t really mind. Nice relaxing Sundays are rather overrated in my opinion. But having my plans suddenly altered before I’m even really awake is not my favorite way to start the day.

Today progressed in a somewhat similar vein, except that today is Tuesday and I had at least managed to crawl out of bed, drink my coffee, and have a shower before the plan-altering text arrived. It was from my mom, informing me that she needed someone to take our sick dog to the vet for her, as she had to go to work. I agreed, but I’m the sort of person who thinks of all the details, so I didn’t fail to note that I didn’t know the way to the vet, had no money to pay them, and that my uncooperative tin can would be very reluctant to drive all the way there (my tin can doesn’t like to drive anywhere that takes longer than fifteen minutes and involves speeds of more that 35 miles per hour, and even then it would just as soon stay home).

To make a long story short, I quickly blasted my hair with the blow drier, packed up the pizza sticks I was planning to eat for lunch, the potatoes I was planning to fix for dinner, and the book I was planning to pass the day with and headed over to my mom’s house to trade cars and receive further instructions on taking the dog to the vet. Then, desperate not to have to face the task alone, I texted my sister and asked if she would come with me if I came to pick her up on the way. She said she would.

So, nearly an hour before the vet appointment, I loaded the poor, sad dog into the car and drove to the house where my sister and her boyfriend live. But when I called her to tell her I was waiting outside she informed me that they weren’t home at the moment, but would be shortly. I spent ten anxious minutes playing Shoot Bubble on my cell phone (which, by the way, is a rather demoralizing game, as it is fond of loudly informing me that I am a loser if I don’t manage to get rid of all the colored bubbles in time) before they finally arrived and we departed for the vet. All was well, however. We arrived exactly on time.

The entire appointment lasted maybe twenty minutes and we ended up leaving the dog there to get some x-rays and such. I returned my sister to her house and then went back to my mom’s to fix dinner. Fortunately, the day concluded pleasantly with roasted chicken, mashed potatoes, and a new episode of “NCIS,” which was only disappointing because it wasn’t the one where we find out how Gibbs and Tony met.

Anyway, as with the original 7:55 day I don’t really mind it. It was not the day I was intending to have but it was not a terrible day by any means. Now if only I could find a way to be as productive with my schoolwork as I was with today’s tasks, I would be doing very well indeed.

But What Are You Going to DO With That?

So, I’m a history major, in case you hadn’t guessed.

When I meet someone new and they learn that I’m a college student, they usually ask me what my major is. When I tell them, they almost invariably respond with, “What are you going to do with that?”

Until last fall, I was planning on majoring in history education and being a history teacher. Most people could accept that answer fine, never mind that education in my state is being cut up, down, left, and right and so it’s not really a great time to be a new teacher trying to find a job. Never mind all of that. I was going for a degree that would qualify me for a specific job, which was fine.

But now everything is different. A history degree doesn’t qualify you to do much of anything except get more history degrees and eventually become a professor so that you can help other nerds get their useless history degrees, thus perpetuating the cycle. So nobody understands why I’m getting one. And they really don’t understand when I respond to that invariable question by saying that I don’t know what I’m going to do after I graduate.

I get it. The economy sucks. A lot of people don’t understand spending thousands of dollars on school if there’s not going to be some immediate payoff. But getting a very specialized degree isn’t going to make a job magically appear where it doesn’t exist. No matter what degree I get, I’m not going to have many job prospects when I graduate. If I’m going to end up in the same place no matter what, I might as well get a degree in something I like.

And you know what? I really like school. I never liked school. Ever. I liked junior high because I liked the person I was, but I didn’t like school itself. I hated high school. I hated my first semester of college. But now I finally am actually enjoying school. I like my classes. I like the things I’m learning about. For the first time I feel like I’m living my life instead of just waiting for it to start. That’s worth it, to me.

I honestly don’t know what I’m going to do when I graduate. I might go to graduate school. I might not. (Sometimes, when I’m feeling particularly insane, I actually entertain the notion of going to law school, but then I remember that I don’t have nearly enough motivation for that.) I’ll figure it out. I don’t feel the need to have the rest of my life planned out. I’m pretty sure that never works.

I think what bothers me the most about the “what are you going to do with that” people is the implication that there’s no value in actually getting the degree, its only worth is what kind of a job it can land you. But even if my history degree proves to be, as I once heard someone refer to all liberal arts degrees, “just a piece of paper that says you can rub two brain cells together,” I’ll always know I had a great time getting it. Nobody can ever take that away from me.

All Roads Lead to Choir

It’s been kind of a hard year.

First, I should clarify that by year I mean school year. In my world there have always been two types of years. One starts in January and ends in December and the other one starts in August and ends in June (July just gets left out).

Everything changed in August. I moved into an apartment on my college campus, which I love, but change is always hard and moving sucks. It took awhile to get used to. Then some really good friends moved away. My whole life seemed to be one giant upheaval. But there was hope on the horizon. September was coming and that gave me hope in two forms: school and choir.

School was great last year. I went expecting to hate it and I loved it. This year, almost the opposite happened. I went expecting it to be awesome and I hated it. All my classes were easy and boring, but I had to spend hours every day doing mindless homework. By October I was counting the weeks until Christmas break and in the meantime I threw all my energy into choir.

If you don’t know me very well, you should know that everything always comes back to choir. If something goes wrong, it’s because of choir. If something goes so amazingly well I can’t believe it, it’s because of choir. I could start writing about any aspect of my life, and within a paragraph or two, I would be writing about choir.

The problem last fall was that I had too much brain energy and nowhere for it to go. So I focused it on really stupid “problems” like why the church Christmas concert had been changed from one performance each on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, to one performance on Saturday and two on Sunday. I obsessed more over that than I did about the entire semester’s school work combined.

But then Christmas came, the semester from hell ended, the concert was a blast even without the Monday performance, and I almost believed that all would be well again. Except that Christmas break kind of sucked. By New Year’s, I was tired of sitting around with nothing to do all day. I wanted school to start again. I wanted to get on with an awesome new semester that would make me forget how crappy the last one was. I should have known it wasn’t going to happen that way.

The new semester started and it was going pretty well, not amazing, but not terrible, and then my obsessive energy found a new outlet: my vocal adequacy (or inadequacy, depending on what sort of mood I was in on any particular day). At first I thought that might be a somewhat productive thing to obsess over, because How I Can Be a Better Singer is certainly a more legitimate use of brain power than Why We’re Not Having the Concert on Monday. But it’s turned into…well, it’s turned into a mess.

And that, unfortunately, is where I have to end the story. See, I don’t usually talk about my various cohorts on this blog because I’m sure the moment I did they would all develop magic Someone Is Talking About Me sensors and come wandering over here to have a look, and then I would have to answer a bunch of questions about Why I Was Writing About Them On the Internet. So that is why I have to leave out the specifics of how I turned my life into a giant mess.

The point, though, is that I’m basically in the same place I was last fall, which is to say, I’m bored. I have a lot of mental energy that has nowhere to go. I could find a new hobby, sure, but I don’t want a hobby. In an average week I spend about seven hours at church and wish it was more. Finding something that takes an hour or two ever week is not going to help. I need an all-consuming lifestyle. Maybe I should join a cult (I’m just kidding, for those of you who can’t read sarcasm).

I know I probably expect too much of choir. It gets me through the week. It gives me something to care about. It’s where I met most of my really good friends. I guess sometimes I should give choir a break and focus at least a little of my energy on something else, even if that something else is writing blog posts about choir so that I can pretend there isn’t a French Revolution test tomorrow that I should be studying for.