Briefly So They Will Read It

by Amy Stein

someone said to me that this is not a happy time in my life.

i said, no, it's not unhappy, just no longer carefree.

as much as i want to deny it, as much as i want to have it all together, i don't know what i'm going to do with the rest of my life. and unfortunately, for someone like me, that's not an exciting prospect. i'm working to turn it around, to change the floundering feeling into one of endless possibility but it feels forced.

i worry that my aspirations are so far fetched that at the end of the day, some day when real life hits, i'll be left with nothing concrete, and a bunch of silly-seeming ideals. that being said, i don't want to give up on some dreams that may seem ideal, just because they seem too big for now.

Things I Want to Do:

-Become an EMT with the FDNY (PAT scheduled for March)

-Become a jockey (http://nara.kctcs.edu/)

Things I Like to Do:

-Fence (I need to find the money to fence again)

-Knit

-Write

-Photograph

-Draw

-Shoot

-Read

I've reined myself in a lot, made most of my interests hobbies instead of career plans (contrary to popular belief, fencing doesn't pay in the long run). but i still worry, if not any of these things, if these things are just nice hobbies, then what will i do?

And see, this is sort of why i'm a journalism major, because i can experience all of these things without having to DO them fulltime. but then i don't actually experience them, i just get a taste, and i'm always left as an outsider at the end of the day. so it's just a tease, really, to write about them all.

maybe i should just become an author like ted connover. he wanted to write a book on the prison system, and they wouldn't let him. so he said, fine, if i can't go around it, i'll go right on through, and he became a prison guard and wrote about it.

i'll certainly be writing about my emt experience, even if only as a blog, just to get it all out of my head, and to remember. but i know i won't do that forever.

and, most of all, what if the emt thing doesn't work out? what then?

jeesh, with so much up in the air it's hard to see what's actually concrete and what's not.

by Ryan McGinley

i feel like i'm in a wind tunnel and everything is airborne and if i try to reach out and hold onto one thing, i'll just get hit by something heavier.