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The Life of a Teenager: A Personal Update

IT SEEMS AS if all of my post recently have been rather...impersonal. Essays, old poetry, new poetry -- nothing about the current events of my life and times, the subject which I'm certain all my Dear Readers come to me for. So, for the sake of a recap and a catching up, I'll explain where I've been the past few weeks and what I've been doing.

As you have probably noticed, schoolwork is becoming a rather prevalent part of my time. It seems as if everytime I turn around there is another speech to be written for Public Speaking, or another test to be taken for Trigonometry. Completing study guides on-time for my Computer Science class and remembering that I've forgotten to answer question handouts for Major British Writers as class begins seems to weigh down my mind more than anything else. It is actually rather suprising to me: in high school I was a fiend at my English courses, always straight A's, and in math I always barely whizzed by with a D. Now, as I'm entering my fourth semester in college, it seems as if it has polarized itself. I can sleep through my morning Trigonometry class for a week, barely retaining consciousness throughout the period, and get a perfect score on the exam, whereas in my English course I have a hard time retaining a C average at all, forgetting to turn in work and flat-out refusing to read the assigned material (for instance, I have only one week in which to read Charles Dickens' Bleak House, a massive book culminating stories across over 1,000 pages). I enjoy the poetry aspect of it, as in the material derived directly from our text, so much so that I have been posting here poems that I very much enjoy or am moved by. But as far the book goes, I think I may one day read it of my own accord, but not here and not now.

Speaking of reading and writing, my play is going along fairly well. Our original Wednesday meetings have stopped upon Stuart getting a job at Banana Republic, and were supposed to be moved to Sunday nights. I, however, am having trouble getting that night off, so for the past two weeks we have had no meeting whatsoever, only the trust in each other that we are continuing the necessary work on our own. As of next week, we should have the first draft of the play completed, considering that as of now I am still working on the second scene in the third act, in which the two main characters make a drug drop at a transvestite's house. Humor in its finest.

Also -- and this may come as a fairly large shock to some, as it did to me -- I have almost completely decided to change my major from Physics to Nursing. Don't worry, it's not because I've had some life-altering event that's caused me to stop desiring a professorship. No, it is only that I realize my options are limited. You see, I was a bad student in high school. Added to that, my first year of college wasn't all that hot, either. Now that I've gotten into the flow of things I'm closer to straight A's than I've ever been in my life, but still with only two more semesters left until transfer, I worry I haven't the grades to be accepted into NC State. I certainly don't want to spend all that time and money, only to look like a fool when no one lets me in (besides the fact that I'd be kicked out of the house for my own idiocy). And even if I got in, I am not assured a way to pay for it all. All in all, it is a very risky move.

On the other hand, if I switch to Nursing I'll have already completed many of the prerequisites for the program in my previous two years anyway. Also, the choice would allow my parents to keep me in the house until I finished, out of sheer glee that I had "come to my senses." I could do what my father's been trying to convince me to do for years: be a Nurse for however many years it takes to save the money to go back to school and do what I really want. "You're only nineteen," he says. "You have all the time in the world!" It's either that or finish my Associates in Science here at JCC and then join the military so they can pay for my school, and although I really want the adventure I don't want to sacrifice my own morality for it (besides the fact that they want to reinstate the draft, so I may be going whether I want to or not).

Well, besides the extra finger I've recently grown, I think that's about it. I'm writing more songs, and even putting some of them in a songbook of mine. I recently discovered I'm a fan of Billy Joel. And I'm dating-but-not-so-much-dating a lovely girl whose named cannot be mentioned, and, needless to say, we are enjoying ourselves and I'm getting myself in trouble for being out too late. Ah, the life of a teenager...I never thought I'd get to see it.