I’ve been away from this blog far to long, because I’ve been awful busy trying to figure out my life. Again. Surprise! I’ve always had this horrible sense of ‘not good enough’, a sense of complete dissatisfaction with every major I declare in school. Yes, even going to school to have a job playing with serial killers wasn’t enough for me. I’ve struggled greatly over the past few years trying to figure out what in the actual hell I am going to do with myself, and have realized recently that maybe I can quiet down all that inner yelling if I just, very eloquently, say “fuck it” and do what I want. So, alas, I have just returned from a meeting with an advisor at the university I’m transferring to next fall. I made this appointment with a woman who specializes in helping students create their own degree programs, as there is no doubt I won’t be able to settle for something everyone else already has (coughcoughbrat). Anyway, I had to come up with an idea to pitch that wasn’t along the lines of “I want to be able to go hunt for cryptozoological creatures in every known country on earth, then probably settle down somewhere in California where I can study UFO’s and Bigfoot from my own backyard.” So, using my creative little noggin, I sugar-coated this, just a bit. “I would like a degree that blends media and television production, cultural and anthropology studies, and history”. That seems normal, right? “I want to produce documentary-style television shows that focus on traveling around the world to explore different elements of different cultures.” I just sort of left out the part that should have included “mostly their beliefs about different things that lurk in the shadows”. This pitch was not entirely bullshit, I have always had a very strong interest in other, mostly non-Americanized cultures, and would genuinely enjoy a job where I could just run around the globe sharing different cultures with people who never get the chance to leave the US themselves. Ironically, the advisor perked right up and said “Oh! You know my husband and I just started watching this show called Expedition Unknown!” to which I immediately replied “Yeah, that host is named Josh Gates, and I very literally want his life. So help me design a degree that will get me that sort of job.” So, in the end, I walked back out onto the lawns of the ridiculously large, intimidating campus (that I had never even seen until today. Oops.) with new hope that I could probably maybe do something with this little life of mine. All that inner screaming that I need to get a MOVE ON with my life has quieted down, at least for the moment, and for the first time, I’ve officially decided to just go ahead and plunge head-on into the mysterious world of attempting to, as cheesy as it is, ‘follow my dreams’. Student loans, be damned, I say. For the most part, I’m just hoping this all goes according to plan. But if I’m wrong, and I end up going to graduate school for something completely unrelated, at least I can one day say “one time in college I graduated with a major I designed specifically to make shows about monster hunting”, and I will forever be the coolest aunt of all my siblings little monsters. And frankly, that’s worth it.