What in the world am I going to do with my education?!

Sometimes it bothers me that I’m taking up Economics. Aside from the fact that, roughly eight weeks into the first semester of my first college year, I am bored with studying it, I have no idea what I’ll do with it afterwards. It’s not just Econ; there’s Nat Sci and Creative Writing and Socio. And PE, regrettably. As much as I enjoy the novelty of attending classes I picked and interacting with a greater variety of people, sometimes I feel like throwing it all out the window. I feel restless. I don’t know what to do with myself. If the world had a nuclear explosion and all life got wiped out or mutated, there is actually no sense in continuing these sorts of studies. I mean, I may well be able to tick off the great thinkers one after the other in accurate succession, but at the end of the day, when you’re dying of hunger (in a world where possibly the grass is red and you have web-like appendages growing between your fingers), it’s not the ticket to getting yourself fed. Of course that’s just my imagination. I guess I’m thinking up of reasons why not to study. I like to learn, certainly, but that is, as Oscar Wilde points out succinctly, quite different from “education”.

What am I going to do? As a child, I used to want to be an archaeologist, until that idea bored me. Then I wanted to become a chef, until relatives dissuaded me; to my great bitterness, I learned years later that my cousin enrolled herself in CCA. Dream stealers—they came in and took away what I really wanted, and all that was left of me was my “smart” head. Ah, then UP is the key!, they told me. They urged me to take up Accountancy, a surefire way to getting paid afterwards. It was during those times that I absolutely despised discussing my future; I wanted to be spared of the pressure and of the alarming feeling that I was going to end up with something I didn’t want. In the end, it didn’t matter. I chose Economics partly because it sounded good enough to pacify my critics. But as I said, it doesn’t matter anyway; blindfolding myself and shooting darts at courses randomly would have been as effective. So here I am, in Economics, where the book is so tedious that it makes me want to tear it to little pieces and feed it to the dogs, where I don’t even get the reason why its discussion is important in the first place. This, of course, begs the question: then what is important in life? I honestly don’t know yet. Family, I suppose, and friends, and finding out who you are. Is there any course to study this? Psychology I guess, but the real classroom comes in the form of Everyday Life.

Right. Well. Attempting to live in Everyday Life can be frustrating. College has stripped away all the secure familiarities I’ve had, including the ones that I thought were permanent. A small implosion has gone off inside my head, and everything I thought I stood for has just been smashed to smithereens.

I hate it; I just figured out who I was and what I wanted, then bam. I have to start from scratch. Again. Like a house of cards lovingly, painstakingly built up, a slight tremor from the ground has suddenly upset everything.

Growing pains and hormonal imbalances—and suddenly, I feel like a wreck.

You know, if I just didn’t have a conscience

I might have probably stopped school right now.