I came home today, to learn that the itty bitty high school seniors are finding about their colleges of choice around now.
The giving, loving, sweet part of me wants to see them get into Smith and Cornell and Oxford and Princeton and UC-Berkely, pack their matching suitcases and leave this little hill town behind, preserve memories of coffee shops and early morning bagels and lovely fall country roads in translucent fossilized amber.
The bitter, unmitigated part of me wants them to taste failure and rejection, to face the next four years and see unchanging surroundings, lowered expectations. To see them move from hope and new life to a sour, biding-my-time sort of attitude.
Maybe I am more well-suited to this restraint, though. I've been saying it for a long time and I still think it's a little true -- I'm not invested in my own happiness. My academics are about competition, departmental status and proving other people wrong. My athletics are about reaching for perfections, accumulating knowledge and skill and using it to its fullest extent. Whatever I do socially, I do out of obligation to old friends, family members, or those people I need to keep diplomatic relations with. I love my girlfriend because I love her and it is not what I would have chosen, but I invest the future of my life in her, instead of myself.
reading: nothing, actually.
listening to: curbside prophet // jason mraz
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