A Little Anxious? You Betcha...

So G.K. Chesterton, the artist par excellence of probing whimsy, argued that "man must have just enough faith in himself to have adventures, and just enough doubt of himself to enjoy them." So this next chapter in my life should be full of life, liberty, and rollicking good fun. Right?

Yet I find myself facing what appears to be an utter and complete tabula rasa of human experience. Of course, having grown up in the goodly Western country of Wyoming, the schoolboy in me was taught to see such a milieu as an adventure to be grasped, an opportunity to conquer. And then there's the tired old trope about how the word "crisis" in Chinese is a combination of "danger" and "opportunity" (incidentally, that's a load of malarkey: see here for explanation--http://www.pinyin.info/chinese/crisis.html). Yet the Eeyore in me sees something very different. He sees contingency, chance aka the chance for things to horrifically wrong. Eeyore is not a pessimist necessarily; he is content with the mediocre: "Thanks for noticin' me." Eeyore is all too comfortable with the ordinary, the mean. All too comfortable slipping into the masses unnoticed.

Confused yet? So am I. Basically, I'm 26 years old and I'm not wholly convinced on where I want to go from here. Things with Emily have not exactly worked out as planned, and plus, the University of Kentucky is pushing me to go to Wisconsin to learn Vietnamese. I'm not fully convinced I even want to be a history professor; then again, I'm not convinced about much else either. History professors are terribly aloof from reality; when profs. tell you that they're insane about their subject, believe them. I love the stuff, but do I want it to feed my family as a profession?.

So far, the feelings I've been getting have not exactly been comforting about the future...but the thoughts of changing course are too terrible to entertain. It would mean forfeiting much of my goodwill with the University of Kentucky and leaving me rudderless as far as a professional path. Academia remains the most solid choice, even if it leaves a bittersweet aftertaste in my mouth.