Priorities (3)

So I'm in college, back in the school I went to first, before I decided to become a person with religious zeal and drop out of college and go to a new, worse college, and then get dissatisfied with that college, come back home, get a dead-end job, and decide, four years later that i should go back to college again at the first one. Breathe, Drew. Long sentences weren't designed for people of limited intelligence.

And the question of writing keeps coming into my mind. None of my credits transferred from the worse college. I wasn't expecting them to, but that leaves me as a freshman again. I have a lot of general education requirements to get out of the way, and some of them are as dull as dirt. I thought this semester would be easy, with classes that perfectly re-acclimated me into the college mindset. Turns out, no. I'm stuck doing hard work in classes that have nothing to do with what I want to do.

The spoiled person's mindset would say, "I don't care. I'll find a way to take the classes I want to take and leave the boring ones out, and fuck the degree." I have a friend who did that. The problem is, those kinds of people don't last. They really don't. He does nothing, and he doesn't plan on doing anything.

In the end, getting spoiled doesn't give one anything, does it? I mean, I could do that, but what would I get? Would I get a degree? No. Would I learn self-discipline? No. I would end up thousands of dollars in debt with nothing to show, and that would put me farther away from where I want to be.

So I have to take the shit classes, don't I? Yes, Drew, you do. Even if by taking them it means I can't write as much as I'd like--in the short term. Yes, Drew, it does.

This sucks. It's funny how, four months into the thing, I'm just picking up on the fact that it sucks. But it's necessary, to do what I want to do in life.

Dreams, dreams are tough animals. They either become your best friends or your continual torturers. If you do what it takes to achieve them you get the satisfaction of moving on and knowing you're going in a good direction. If you don't, you go crazy. I've been going crazy for four years. I might be crazy now, but I'm going back to sanity. Slowly. But I'm going there.

So that's what started me on this line of thinking. I started writing a novel for National Novel Writing Month. And guess what? It took over my life, made my school suffer, made me not care about the crap classes. It did that for a week, then I started thinking, and had to think about it for about three days before I came to a decision. What kind of writer do I want to be? A science-fiction writer? Because that's what the book was about. I don't want to be a science-fiction writer. It's fun to do stuff like that once in a while, but really, letting it take over your life? Letting yourself get sucked into something that will never go anywhere, and letting it ruin your actual life in the process?

National Novel Writing Month is a great thing, I'm sure, but not while I'm in school. Right now I have to keep focused on the goal. The thoughts that berate me now are the same thoughts I had seven years ago, when I was first in school. I dropped out (basically) after one semester. This time I want to go to completion. The future is at stake. How many more chances are there, for someone my age? I don't want to get married right now, I don't want to have kids. If I'm going to do anything, I still have a chance now, and I'd better do it. That's it. That's the end. No matter how unpleasant the situation might be, no matter how hectic my life might get, I need to stick with it, because the future is at stake.