What Do You Want to Be when You Grow Up?

            I have to admit, despite the fact that I have finals for the next 3 days, I have yet to really sit down, crack open a book, and uh… READ. Unfortunate for those classes, but actually pretty great for my art.
 I paper mached a table:

Used up some ink:

And of course, the ultimate product of my creative procrastination, this: The SummerSalt Project.

My friend Ryan and I were talking last night about what we want to do with our lives. Of course they’re at polar opposite ends of the spectrum. His: math. (Yuck). Mine: writing and/or art. Then Ryan asked me something I didn’t expect.

“So, that poses the question, why are you worried about how you do in chemistry?”

I looked at the words for a bit, scrambling around in my head and trying to formulate a semi-cohesive answer. I didn’t know. Then I extended my thoughts to the rest of my school, and then the county school system and to larger and larger degrees of students. Why do we care so much about grades?

Obviously that’s not an easy question to answer. But here’s my theory:

This is (whether we know it or not) the basic thought process behind a teenager.

1)  1)  Get good grades. In elementary, middle, and high school.

2)   2) Apply to really awesome colleges that will hopefully accept us because of our totally stellar grades mentioned above.

3)   3) Get accepted to said school. Buy college paraphernalia to show our patriotism to our university.

4)   4) Get stellar grades in college. So that then:

5)  5)  We apply to really awesome jobs that will hopefully pay us lots of money.

6)  6)  Get accepted to said job. Buy company paraphernalia to show our patriotism to your company.

7)   There is no number 7.

At some point in our process of planning for our future, we skip over the rest of our lives. How long do we have until we hit number 6? For me it’s just about 7 years. I have the next seven years of my life planned out; which is such an insignificant amount of time in a human lifespan, it seems pathetic. Why are we gearing ourselves up from such a young age for a meager 7 years?

Answer: Because it’s been shoved into our brains since we were able to walk and talk. “She’ll be a lawyer that one; she’s just so precocious.” Welcome to the words that saturated my childhood. I was 2 and people were already talking about my future.

Age 8 visiting my Aunt Rose in Florida:

Aunt Rose: “I hope you go to Yale.”

8 Year old me: “Why?”

Aunt Rose: “Because I want to tell everyone in this place (waves hand around at retirement facility) that my niece goes to Yale.”

This progresses further and further as we move through our stages in school. Now as a sophomore, it’s unbearable. It seems as if anyone I meet is asking me where I plan to go to school. If you could see my inbox right now (and most likely my mailbox, not sure, I haven’t checked that one yet) they are crammed with letters from colleges.

So it’s inevitable that we’re going to get this totally warped vision of our future that involves the perfect grades to get the perfect job to get the perfect paycheck. And then the future ends. That’s as far as our minds span.

So then what? Do we just work at that perfect job with that perfect paycheck just to wait for the day we get our Federal mandatorily funded Social Security paycheck? What kind of a life is that?

Take little kids for instance. They don’t see the future as we do. They have these totally outrageous plans that make us laugh at them. They want to be princesses, they want to grow up and be president, maybe become a superhero on the side. We laugh and tell them to think more realistically.

Why?

Why can’t we leave kids alone to be kids? Let’s let them dream so they don’t arrive at the same rut we come to when we think of our lives. We should say to go for it! Why do we try to cram reality into their tiny skulls before the cranium has even completely fused together? That’s what happened to us, and look where we wound up.

I’d like to think I could plan my life a little further than that. Because I don’t want to just be one of the billions of people who gets a college degree and sits behind a desk from 9-5 in a row of cubicles like some kind of stable animal.

I want to leave something behind when I leave. I want to know that I’m more useful than producing carbon dioxide and less wasteful than consuming the precious resources of this planet we call Earth.

Looking at the grand scale of our universe, I’m so insignificant. I’m not even a speck. Not even the pinpoint of a thumbtack. So why should it matter what I get on my chemistry exam Tuesday, or Algebra on Wednesday?

Why did adults set us up to feel this way from the earliest stages of life and set us into this irreversible cycle of worry?

Of course I say all of this as if these things really aren’t a big deal to me. However, they are. I’ll be studying for the rest of the weekend so that I can get the perfect grade so I can get accepted to the perfect university, so that I can get the perfect job, and have the perfect retirement complete with home on a golf course (I don’t even like golf, by the way), and then rest my straight A body to decompose. Picture perfect, right? Ha.

So thanks Ryan for asking me that question. It obviously gave me a lot to think about. Hopefully I’ll someday listen to my thoughts that tell me how ridiculous I’m being. Maybe I’ll decide to be a princess, or the first Italian-American President of the United States. Who knows, but for Pete’s sake, stop asking me where I’m going to apply to next year and let me dream.