One More Chapter
A twenty two year-old's view on life, death,
and Taylor Swift conspiracy theories
and Taylor Swift conspiracy theories
The other day all English majors were required to attend an orientation session. It was, as expected, very boring as it was just a series of speakers telling you things that, for the most part, you already knew. Then a woman took the stage to talk to us about internships. After the countless monotonous presentations we had just heard, her booming voice and sarcasm was like being splashed with ice cold water. I immediately recoiled from her, thinking she was rude and obnoxious and didn't have anything productive to tell me. I was wrong. She started off on what seemed more like a journey through her stream-of-consciousness rather than an actual story. I started to tune her out and focus of the odd man ceaselessly twitching to rows in front of me, but suddenly she said something that caught my attention. "You're eighteen and nineteen years old" she told us, "you aren't supposed to know what you want to do for the rest of your life." I looked up at her again. "Only 2% of people in this world actually grow up to be what they wanted to be when they were a child. That leaves 98% who have no idea what they want, or think that they do, then end up realizing they don't once they experience it." This is so me, I thought. "The only way you can know if you really love to do something is to do it. So that means we have to do a little stumbling and bumbling until we get to where we want to be." I smiled. She' completely right. I thought for the longest time that I wanted to be a chef when I grew up. I would make these "experiments" with my sister that were actually just all the spices we could find in the cabinet and a dash of water and much more than a dash of food coloring. We forced my parents to eat it sometimes. Those poor parents. I'm surprised they didn't get violently ill. I grew up always wanting to help my mother in the kitchen and prepare dinners. Soon I was bumped up from plastic butter knives to metal butter knives, then the slightly sharper, dinner knives, paring knives, and when I reached high school I was practically using a butcher knife to do everything - just because I could. I went to a vocational high school and studies Culinary Arts and Pastry/Baking Arts for four years. I loved it, it was the best decision I made, but it made me realize that this wasn't what I wanted in life. I still absolutely love to cook and bake and prepare food for my family and friends, but I now know that I could never work in a kitchen as a career. You have horrible hours, you smell awful, there is perpetually a mysterious substance under every fingernail, and it is absolutely exhausting. Plus, I want to celebrate Christmas and Easter and other such holidays with my family and not be stuck scrubbing grease off of grills instead. So, when college application time rolled around, I knew it was time to do a lot of thinking. I was sitting at my computer editing my dance studio's commercial for their annual recital, when it clicked. I made videos all the time, ever since I was about four or five. I obsessively watched special features on my DVD's and I knew more about movies than almost any of my friends. When I watched The Oscars every year I almost cried because I wanted to be there so bad. Soon I began looking into film schools instead of culinary schools and I had to tell my parents the changes that would soon be coming. Telling my mother that I no longer wanted to be a chef like I thought I had for sixteen or seventeen years was hard for me, because I knew she really wanted me to. When we toured some culinary colleges (just for good measure) she would tell me that this was where she wished she had gone to school. It made me feel like I was taking away something from her. But it was my life and I needed to do what was right for me. I also knew that I now had the option to major in English. I have always loved English and it's always been my favorite subject in school, but I never thought that I would be able to major in it in College. This was mainly because more culinary schools only have baking, cooking and serving, but also because I just didn't think that I was good enough at it. But now I was free to major in whatever I so pleased, and I really wanted to write. So here I am, at Umass Amherst, majoring in Communications (with a concentration in Film Studies), English (with a concentration in Fiction writing) and Journalism while minoring in French and getting my certificate in Film Studies (which is different than my concentration...I know, it's a bit confusing). And now that I have done some stumbling and bumbling, I have found where I was meant to be. And if somewhere down the line I find that I have enough money to open up a cupcake shop with Victoria Carrier, so be it, because that sounds f***ing awesome. So don't worry if you don't know what you want to do in life, you need to try things out before you could ever know such a thing. Thank you for reading, Amanda Lucille Song of the DayStubborn Love by The Lumineers
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
About This Blog:I started this blog as a way to challenge myself to write more over the 2014 year, but it has blossomed into so much more than that. I use it to let people in on what's happening in my life, talk about things I find important and to spread the news about amazing people, places and art. Archives
November 2017
|