A Hazy Shade of Spring?

    I’ve been hanging out with someone from Mt. Holyoke College, a nearby all girls school, almost every Friday night for the past month or so and I have discovered something that might deter me from these trips. It is really bleeding foggy near that place in the spring. I mean, it is scary driving through that mess! Always traveling at night was intimidating to begin with, since the road bends and twists like a confused anaconda and limits my vision to about a hundred yards. Now I have to slow to a crawl to get through. It’s bad enough that I’m worried about a deer or a person running out in front of me when I can’t see them, yet the icing on the cake is that the fog itself is eery. Normally I enjoy walking through fog in the day or night, as the mist swirls into interesting shapes and I can pretend that I’m walking through any fog-drenched fantasy world that I like, as I cannot see anything to contradict me.
    However, this fog is something else entirely. It doesn’t drift in languid swirls so much as twists and contorts, writing into leering shadows or simply blinding me for spite. More light doesn’t help, as the water reflects my headlights back into my eyes, dazzling me and exposing nothing. When the fog seems to be at its thickest and the dark impenetrable and I am resigned to creeping through the murk, I’ll break through. As if breaking a barrier or breaching the surface of a glassy lake, I crash into a perfectly clear night. In my rearview mirror the mist seems solid and taunting, observant, and I am only too glad to put it behind me. Until five minutes later anyhow and I plow straight into another fog bank just like the first. As I’m a blond teenager in the middle of essentially the woods, at three in the morning, and in ominous fog, part of me begins to wonder if I’ve wandered into a horror flick. Leaving that town feels like escaping Silent Hill and every five minutes I expect a pyramid head to jump out at me, or whatever the monsters in those games are called. I never played them.
    B-film horror or not, I feel ecstatic when I near Amherst and the night becomes natural again. Straight roads and an unobstructed view never look so good. Between that sort of drive and my antics at Mt. Holyoke, when I see my bed at about five a.m., it to me appears as a lake might to a man lost in a desert. I dive into the sheets and stay submerged until midday.
    I should mention that, over this last weekend, I got slammed with about three hundred pages of reading, an essay, a film to watch and review, and a six page stats assignment all as homework due for Monday. The moment I woke up to realize that I hadn’t even started and it was already half-way through Saturday was not so much distressing as depressing. I was looking at the gallows and there was no way I was getting off the platform. So what do I do? I plant myself in a chair and bury my nose in a book, feverishly working to meet my deadlines.
    For about an hour that is. I found out that there was some sort of carnival going on in the honors college and there was food, rock climbing, and a petting zoo among other things. I need a break, my sleep-deprived brain says, dominating the small fraction that is still awake and screaming for me to work. Thus, I went to meet some friends and, after getting something to munch on, proceeded to ignore everything except for the petting zoo because oh my god the ducklings, bunnies, chicks, baby goats and micro pig were adorable! Best school sponsored carnival ever!
    Once I spent over an hour with my friend Yoonjin snuggling fluffy adorable cuddly squeaky squirmy endearing proto-breakfast animals, I returned to the grindstone for all of two hours before I remembered an important detail that had slipped my mind: One of my best friends on campus was having their birthday party that night. Crap.
    I had planned on tearing through as much work as possible before the dance that the honors college had scheduled for us around 9pm. This changed things a bit. Instead of working, I ended up playing cards against humanity, munching on chocolate, and nearly choking on Sprite when something particularly offensive made me laugh. Since my friend is a dance major I thought that, once we were done with cards, we would manage to catch the last few hours of dancing and I’d be able to cut loose and go wild. Not so. I forgot just how averse this group of friends is to having fun- I mean- partying. I love them and almost always have a great time with them, but they are not the extroverted club-goers that I keep yearning for. Then again, those Bacchanalian kids typically aren’t as creative, witty, or accepting as my beloved geeks.
    Once the card game ended we just sort of… hung out. I knew that it was Erica’s birthday and I wanted to help her enjoy it as much as possible, but I was getting downright morose sitting there. I had nothing to do and was envying her having a romantic relationship, all while being overly conscious of the dancing that I was missing out on. To be honest, I really should’ve ditched. I was probably a wet blanket by that point anyhow. No one wants to hang around someone who doesn’t want to be there. I was bursting to release pent up energy, meet new people, and act without restraint or concerns. By the time I slithered into bed I was still stressed, sad, and a little angry, though I’m not sure at what. It didn’t help that my roommate came back with two of his friends ten minutes after I fell asleep. He’s normally pretty inconsiderate with his crashing around at night to begin with, but when he’s drunk there’s a proper ruckus. Multiply the sound he makes while drunk by three due to his drunk friends and half again due to them all being high and I was awake before they even opened the door. Luckily they were polite enough to leave. Unluckily they were not smart enough to move away from the door while laughing and shouting in the hall. That set a trend for a whole week of sleep deprivation. Starting then I averaged on about four hours each night.
    I don’t know if it was this sleep deprivation or my frustration with life in general that primed me for a career advising session that upset me in every way. For the last two years or so I’ve been laboring to get into the film industry. I had thought that film was the next best thing to novels and my father had taught me that, with the variety of jobs, I would have work and would be able to live while writing novels in my free time. I had made becoming a successful director my objective to support my ultimate goal of becoming a novelist and had planned on learning some technical skills so that I could at least work as an editor until I got a better job. I didn’t want to face the fact that the industry demands absurdly long and bizarre hours, that funneling my time and creativity into the job would leave nothing for my writing, and that becoming someone with any amount of creative say in a film is unlikely. Furthermore, I’ve been doing research on these jobs and have found that, with the exception of the highest demand occupations such as writers, directors, and producers, the pay is sub-par or just plain bad while each practitioner has to hunt for a new job when each project ends. The career counselor stated all of those facts aloud and then added other goodies like how there are no more unpaid internships in Hollywood due to a lawsuit after The Black Swan was made, even though you’re expected do do six or eight before you get even a low end job in the field.
    The meeting set my head spinning. While it encouraged me to continue pursuing novels, I was unsure of how good of an idea sticking with my Film Production and English double major was. When two days later I had my fifth session of editing one of the school’s TV shows, which is mind numbing and tedious, I realized that I only get a kick out of working on creative stuff or my own projects, so broadcast news and talk shows became undesirable. What does that leave for me? Advertising? The imagination needed for that sort of thing is attractive, but I’m not sure my morals would allow me to stoop so low as to join that industry.
    In short, I’m not sure what I want to do with my life anymore. I think I’ve decided that I don’t want to do film, but I don’t know what work I do want until I start publishing books. I think the law would be interesting and David Baldacci practiced law for nine years before he published anything. However, I’ve no experience with that field and don’t know if it would really engage me and I’m not so deluded as to think that I wouldn’t be working 60 hours a week in that field, much like film would have me doing. Even though I would be making money with the law, I don’t want to become a slave to cash by doing something I hate. I could probably find some sort of internship nearby to get a taste of the practice, but I’ve had no luck yet. Even if I did go into the law, how much time would I have for writing? Not much.
    I’m lost. I can’t see any answers and I’m starting to wonder if the choices I made with my education were bad ones. Every career path that I can think of sounds either insecure or monotonous. I know that I’m only a freshman, but I liked having a path before me, even though it was an illusion. At least then I had a purpose. Before Tuesday, I had a goal. Before Tuesday, I was cruising along just fine. Now I’ve again dived into the fog and this fog doesn’t encourage fantasizing and adventure. It is not comforting or peaceful. It is dark, cold, damp, sinister, and I cannot see the way out.

    But hey, the next two Mistborn books are coming out this year, so I can’t be too upset! I’ll lose myself in someone else’s fantasy until I can sort out my own reality.