True love would've punched harder.
So midterm marks are starting to come back. Some things I'm destroying. Others...well, let's hear it for heavily-weighted finals. Welcome to my quarter-life crisis; something about this first post-BA academic crunch has me questioning everything: am I smart enough, hard-working enough, stable enough to be here? Is linguistics the field I love, or am I just a language nerd who's diving into the wrong end of the pool? Do I even like the ivory tower at all, or am I just kidding myself because it's the traditional landing pad for an arrogant pseudo-intellectual with no real marketable skills or desire to grow up? The euphoria has worn off, I feel like I've woken up in a stranger's bed, and I have no idea whether this is the beginning of a third severe bout of depression or a genuine misstep in life. I've got an appointment with an academic counselor on Thursday. Time to figure some things out.
It kills me that my mind-numbing retail job has been giving me more comfort these days. As much as I hate being such a consumerist cog, I'm damnably good at it, and my coworkers are the closest thing I've had to a steady group of friends since I moved to the big city. Heaven help me, though, if I don't either fall back in love with my linguistics MA or find something else more meaningful and real to do with myself. I can't do this forever. For twenty-two years, life has thrown golden opportunities into my lap, and now I feel like I'm running on autopilot waiting for the next one. It's hard to search when I don't even know what I'm looking for.
On a brighter note, I met Christopher Plummer on the weekend. He was charming and old and possibly drunk. Deepa Mehta stopped by the store for another event, too, equally charming, but neither old nor drunk. It's funny how I've become so inured to celebrity encounters. Meet a few of them, and it humanizes them; without the intervening camera and makeup and mythology you realize that they're flesh-and-blood people with smelly socks and cola bottles and hayfever just like anybody else. Work with them and their teams of handlers, though, and they become even less: an event, a fluke of the weather. "Oh, they're calling for an Oscar winner today? OK, put up some velvet ropes and chairs, and don't forget your umbrellas."
