Today we are going to play a game called, “It’s my blog and I do what I want.” This post is long and devoid of pretty pictures and contains only tangential references to Paris. It’s filled to the brim with WHOTHEHELLAMI questions and a tiny bit of “This is what I think about the world.” It is self-indulgent even by my standard. It makes me want to crawl into a corner and hide to think about hitting publish, which makes me think that I should. You have now been warned…
As a kid who read a lot, dreaming of being a writer was sort of an inevitable elementary school goal, in a world where you could be anything but your knowledge of what options existed were few — I mean, what seven year old knows what a copy writer is? In the 8th grade I did one of those college prep projects and around this time that dream transitioned into becoming a journalist. I wanted to go to Medill at Northwestern and get my degree in journalism. I was obsessed with this dream for the next four years.
Over the course of that four years a whole host of things happened to throw me off that goal and confuse it in the way that life tends to throw curve balls at any goal, but particularly with the ones we set for ourselves as children.
Around this time I was plagued by the feeling that college was somehow about foreclosing on the more creative ambitions I had as a little kid. College was the thing I was supposed to do — there was no questioning that — but it also seemed like a point of no return. I was confused (as all 17 or 18 year olds are when presented with the absurd idea that they should be determining their entire future during the commercial break for Jersey Shore).
There was this other thing too…the internet. When I was 9 or 10 I built my first website — an ode to the Spice Girls called Niki’s Cool Spice Site, powered by Angelfire. It was a gaudy atrocity. Black background and a “Welcome” gif that was supposed to look like gold glitter and text in every neon color imaginable. It was appalling, but it was also the point at which I was inducted as a “digital native.” Learning how to view source codes and copy and paste and all of those fancy things alongside learning to write in cursive. (All right, maybe this chronology is a tad off.)
In high school I created a website and forum called FanRock.com. In January of 2003, the social media landscape did not yet exist as we now know it so my basic premise was this: people use the forum to post questions and then I go conduct interviews using their questions. It wasn’t really about crowdsourcing “journalism” so much as trying to be a liaison between fans and bands. The forum got to around 500 members at its peak (a community that I must admit was largely unconcerned with my little interview project) and I got my share of free concert tickets, CDs, and other promotional crap.
But I never really thought of it as anything more than a hobby. By the time college applications rolled around, I was paying less and less attention to it. I had too many other things to worry about.
My application process was something of a crapshoot — something I tried to keep my younger siblings from repeating. I turned in my Northwestern application two weeks late. I was in LA visiting a friend over spring break when I formally found out what I already knew: I didn’t get in.
I ended up going to George Washington in DC to study political science, not wholly deterred from the original goal. I was going to go from that theoretical foundation into working in the news.
Except I hated my political science classes; I hated the way people framed the conversations. I hated the fact that every discussion contribution seemed less about the issue at hand and more about some grand performance of ideological alliance. By my third semester I moved on to sociology and I was preparing to go abroad because I was miserable and I knew something needed to change.
Around that time I was revisiting this sense that I was foolishly sprinting into some sort of formalized structure that would pay no mind to all of the creative things I wanted to do. I toyed with the idea of applying to transfer to film school, but the thought of extending my time in undergrad was just too much to take at that time. Besides, I did really enjoy sociology — I felt like I could wrap my hands about the substance of what we were discussing. I just couldn’t answer the big ubiquitous question: “So what are you going to do with that?”
Going abroad triggered something. My semester in Ghana was the catalyst for a lot that has happened since, (certainly my decision to go school in Paris) but it was also one of the few moments in college that gave me a sense of, “Yes. This is a thing I want to do.” Not the clearest or most articulate portrait of a future, but I knew that I wanted to go as many places as I could and learn as much as I could and ultimately, in some fashion or another, help tell those stories.
College felt like a “Lessons In Shit I Don’t Want To Do” series. I did not enjoy my political science classes and I abhorred my Congressional internship. Those were important lessons, I know that. Every now and then there was a glimmer of a more positive lesson — my post-colonial lit courses, for example, strengthened the feeling that WHO is telling certain stories is an important consideration to keep in mind.
And then I graduated and moved home and fumbled around, suffered through several months of the soul-crushing experience of applying for jobs. Gave up, started working a series of jobs that I knew were options at the moment, even if I couldn’t make any sense out of the future there. But they were learning experiences — there were so many structural and institutional things to take in while working, for example, as a substitute teacher.
I started blogging in this time. Or, rather, I started this blog. I have been doing less public variations on this since middle school. After a really depressing round of applications and worse-than-rejections, complete lack of response, I could go to The City Museum with my sister and come here and laugh about scraping my knees and blah blah blah I could think about anything other than how utterly depressed I felt as I watched what seemed to be all of my friends either return to school or carry on in their awesome jobs that they loved.
But at a certain point I was back in a familiar place: I was feeling trapped. Again, I knew I need to get out. I also knew that I didn’t have the work or educational experience to get the jobs I was applying for. Graduate school seemed like a viable option. I always liked school — what I disliked about my undergraduate experience was the feeling that nothing I was doing had any sort of purpose.
So I needed to find some sort of purpose. Confession: thing #1 was searching for English-language degree programs not located in the US. That trumped all other considerations. I wanted to go abroad again. From there, I was torn between going into English lit, creative writing, or, in what felt like a horrifyingly capricious thing to even consider, film schools.
At some point I realized the common thread was that same go-everywhere-and-absorb-everything-and-then-tell-stories thing. I can’t really pinpoint the moment where I started looking at Communications programs, though I can say that the video production practicum in this program is the thing that officially sold me on it.
I still feel like a child, though. I still have this horribly tremulous feeling whenever I get asked the question of what I’m going to do with my life or why I keep spending all this damn money on school.
It occurred to me recently that part of my problem is that I have this underlying feeling that the options presented to me are too narrow. It’s a false listing — writing, movies, news, whatever.
A whole entire world of new options and forms are emerging; everyone can sort of see and acknowledge that. But I feel (and probably you too, as the breakdown of my readership suggests that the odds are pretty high that you are a fellow blogger) like I have this almost intuitive knowledge of this fact because I was raised in it.
I let my little website die because it was hacked around the time I started college and I didn’t have the patience to deal with it. Then the domain name expired and I was too broke to renew it. I got a quote on buying it back over the summer — it’s in the thousands. It makes me feel like someone else is living in my childhood home (which, by the way, they are, but that’s another issue) to think that someone else owns that name.
It also kills me that I let it fall apart because when I think back on things that mattered to me and how inconsistent my choices were with my personal values and priorities…I don’t understand how I let it happen. But I don’t know how things would have turned out (just like I won’t ever know what an on-time application to Northwestern could have meant) because that’s just the way life’s what-if moments work.
The point here, if I can say that I even have one — this is a personal blog…this is my life, and right now I am talking about a rather substantive part of it. There is no conclusion. It’s one of the reasons I think a blog is more logical format than the memoir — the authors of memoirs have to bring their story around to some sort of conclusion when their lives are obviously still an on-going thing. (Not that I am attempting to liken my shoddy little blog to a well-written memoir, it’s just a comment on structure.)
But, the point! The idea, if you will, is that I am here making sense of this amalgamated form that I want to employ. It’s only half-way through our first semester, but given the short duration of the program, we have to start answering the internship-or-thesis question for our final semester. For my part, I will almost certainly do an internship, probably focusing on news organizations, because that still speaks the closest to the kinds of stories I want to facilitate.
This is one of those moments that makes me think back to the 20sb Summit — the impetus placed on vulnerability. What Jenny Blake would call streaking naked across the internet. Or at least that’s how it feels.
I am not sure if this seems as personal as it feels, but holy shit does it feel like like I am unloading a little slice of my soul. I dodge the big whatdoyouwantodo questions, because my answer is this big amorphous gushy blob and the thought that anyone would scoff at it has a very silencing power. The thought of countless people I respect being privy to this kind of information makes my skin crawl a little. In the last four or five months, the personal state of desperation that birthed this blog has dissipated and this has somehow made me more guarded. I don’t like it.
And avoiding the question is counter-intuitive to what substance does exist in my answer. I have to be able to carve out a clearer sense of who I am and where I stand in order to be able to articulate anything else that I come across. How I interact with my surroundings will necessarily define how I see them, but if I remain this amorphous little blob of a concept, I can’t make sense of the parameters of that phenomenon — clarify its constraints.
I keep coming back to this sense that the question is flawed. The options keep changing, and I know they are changing, so isn’t it a bit ridiculous for me to stand in front of you — literally or figuratively — and say that THIS is what I want to do? The very fabric of any sort of THIS is being transformed, and it seems silly to say I have an overwhelming conviction to pursue THIS.
I guess what I’m saying is that I still am a child and all I want to do when I grow up is change the world. That’s all. No big deal.
don’t you know? the sun’s setting fast. (source)