Rue, rue, rue your boat.

So apparently people don't love me enough to take time to tell me what they think about me? **Referring to this link** (Or just are too busy and/or just don't care. :-p)

My current frustration is trying to figure out what to do for my summer. Ideally I'd like to work, preferably in Chapel Hill/Durham/RTP, but jobs seem to be a little evasive at the moment. I'm trying to figure out if education is what I really want to do with the rest of my life...after tutoring those kids, man, I need to know if maybe there's something I would love more than teaching day in and day out. It's not that I didn't enjoy it, it was awesome to have the kids understand what I was explaining to them (and then they would remember it for tests so their grades improved). But my first love, even before I changed my mind and decided to major in English (instead of Forensic Pathology, long story), was BOOKS! Books, writing, reading, the whole nine yards. I think if I could spend the rest of my life reading, writing, editing books, journals, papers...hey, anything with words in English, then I would be happy. Not to mention I would probably end up well-educated and well-read having gone through all that material! (I might even learn more than what I learned in four years of college.)

I was just thinking about that the other day...how much I actually learned in college from taking all those classes...what I can still remember from lectures, anything useful at all. It's kind of sad, I don't know yet if I can put 45 hours of credit in English to good use. Was all my reading of Chaucer, Pope, Frost, Poe, Hawthorne, Milton, Shakespeare in vain? Will it ever amount to anything worthwhile, all the time I spent writing those darn criticism papers? And what about my other 80+ credit hours? What good is all that history, philosophy, religious studies, etc. doing for me now, other than providing answers to Jeopardy questions? I have a piece of very nice paper that says I did all the coursework and graduated with a "Bachelor of Arts in English" from UNC, but is it worth the paper it was printed on?

Such is the musing of a rueful graduate. I wish I was still an undergrad. To all my friends that are still in undergrad, you all have it lucky. It's all still convenient, even as much as you gripe to me about class, tests, papers, finals. The real world is a whole lot more frustrating than an 8 am class, believe me. And to have the freedom in deciding whether to go to class or not is something I wish I still had. There's really no deciding whether or not to go to work. You just do it if you want to keep your job and get paid.

I need to go back to school, as soon as possible. I've started perusing where I want to expand my graduate school application search. Even to schools outside of NC, yep. Currently doing research on the best schools for education in the country. And the best schools for English/Creative Writing, cause I realize I might be better off pursuing a Master's in Literature and Writing. It might be easier to get in that way, already having my BA, and it expands the possibilities in programs I could apply to.

It scares me to think that more of my important people would up and move after they graduated. Granted, it is still a little ways off for many, but I am sad when people I love move away. Of course, I know that for those who really counted, we would go through heaven and earth to be able to see each other. I rue the fact currently that I haven't been able to see that many of my friends that left last year and scattered themselves across the country. Don't I wish I had the provisions to be able to do that...