On the rest of my life

What is it about college that breeds such unrelenting confusion? Is it something floating vaguely in front of us? Is there a pathogen Academia confusioniodes that presents itself in the air we breath out here in Davis?

I have been thinking very much about this future-thing of mine (the vague, distant, penumbra-encased future-thing). It has finally dawned on me: My degree is in English. English. When I depart from here, I will possess a sheet of paper that signifies four years of book-reading and essay-bullshitting.

This revelation was of course followed by a resounding fuck.

I have clung tightly during my time here to a strong idealism. I hold pure pursuits of the intellect in the highest esteem. I look at academia and the work towards more knowledge and I can feel a connection twining out from my heart to touch it. To read and to write and to learn are the things that sate my soul.

I have held steadfastly to the idea that you do not need a science degree to survive this world, and that remains a firm belief. But I wonder, where does my brain fit? Where will it wedge itself? Where will my ideas find a resting place?

The thought of a perfunctory existence terrifies me. People with their 9-to-5 jobs. Repetition. Schedules and standards and bowing to those above them on the corporate ladder. I fear this idea. FEAR. In the deepest of my organs, I fear it.

It is alien to my brain that contentment can lie in having a family and a spouse and working to provide for them. Maybe even there is love involved. Perhaps. The pain, though--the tragedy--is that where there may have once been a desire to change the world, there is now a singular goal: to successfully cultivate the familial structure.

But, you see, ideas are much greater than the interpersonal family unit.

Ideas transcend all things that are of this earth.

Sure, they are organic to the most basic atomic level, but there is no science that can explain them. They are cosmic in that way.

And I am full of them.

But where is there room to set them down, allow others to arrive, pick them up, examine them, and have learned something?

Is there a schism between the persistence of our ideas and earthly happiness? Contentment?

I am not content until I share my mind.

Always discontent.
Always fear.
Always distinctly separated from those who don't need ideas to live.

But it is the only way I know to thrive.