THIS IS RELEVANT TO NOTHING EXCEPT MY RECENT LIFE PLANNING SESSIONS

From an email to someone I never thought I would be in contact with.

(insert GIF of someone wiping sweat off their brow) Phew, good thing I decided to poke around the ModCloth website because apparently these are the engineering positions they're looking to fill: http://www.modcloth.com/careers and they definitely would not be recruiting at Berkeley for people like me (bloggers, writers, clothing designers), since I think they usually head-hunt those people online. (At least, I think they head-hunted their current blogging team through the internet.) So now I don't have to feel guilty about not writing up a resume or cover letter...

I don't want to work with code. At all. To be honest, I don't think I'm in any position to be doling out advice or any kind of information you should value as useful, because I think I am borderline depressed, seeing as I've reverted to the version of me as a high school senior filling out college applications, which is to say, I think I just want to work in theater again. Or (more) preferably, to die young and not have to worry about work or burdening other people with the knowledge that it will be hard for me to find work. The thing is, I don't want to work for someone else, and I've never really wanted to, and it wasn't until I took a couple semesters of CS courses that I realized I really, really can't do something in a space where I don't feel comfortable enough to be creative. I know there's a lot of space for creativity and innovation in computer science, programming, building up enormous (or elegantly short) pieces of code, manipulating data, whatever, but it's not something I can put myself into. There's some quote that goes ~if you can't put yourself into it, take yourself out of it.

I don't know what I'm doing with myself, and at this point I could not care much less about my declared major (linguistics), and even though I'm a 4.0 student in my major, I wouldn't care much if I got B's in my upper divs this semester because I don't see what the point of this is. At all. I'm not going to work as a linguist. Jobs for half-hearted linguists don't even exist.

So part of me is like, this is selfish. You are being selfish because you owe your family everything, and if you aren't going to be able to support them, if you're going to be dragging them down, you may as well wander off and die because they've invested so much time and energy and love into you, and your so much as thinking of taking it for granted is offensive and unworthy of the kind of lifestyle they've enabled you to have.

And then the other part of me is like, yeah, but mostly they just want you to be happy, or at least not so caught up in your neuroses about what you think you're supposed to be doing that you lose the ability to look around and go, hey, what I have is pretty great. It would be a pity to die because I would lose this.

There's some life/career advice from Eve Ensler (of the Vagina Monologues, which I haven't seen) that goes something like "Give the world the thing you want the most, to fix the broken parts inside you," and for me, I who am broken in stupid ways in stupid places, it has to be art. Maybe for other people it is solving problems for other people, or making cool things that inspire people to go do shit, or making people feel good about themselves, or supporting their family, if you...have grown up too aware of a lack of money and feel that it is the driving force behind all your actions. For me, it is something about young people and the feeling of aloneness or isolation, outsiderness, like something is wrong with you, or like you are holding something too heavy for you to bear but no one can see it. I don't know what that translates to in terms of a career, but I suspect it has very little to do with ModCloth or working for a solid paycheck. I imagine a regular paycheck would be nice, but maybe it's overrated.

Maybe that's a middle-class-America mindset. I don't know. I'm more lower class than middle class. What I do know is that money matters, but only to a point, and for me, I hit that point early and low on the economic scale, because people matter to me so much more than creature comforts. I think I would rather suffer than be mediocre, because at least out of suffering can come great art. Shooting for mediocrity feels like you're just trying to avoid pain, but what's the point? Living is painful. I mean, you have to risk failing hard if you want to do something enormous. It's not like I feel the need to be the next Mark Zuckerberg, but I am pretty sure (and am kind of afraid) that if I'm not doing something that elicits responses from people along the lines of "What you're doing helped me through X," I won't be able to live with myself.

I don't know what the big picture is for what I am doing right now...Just equipping myself with whatever I happen to pass by that looks like it could be lethal if used properly.

For levity, this is a picture of Jesse Eisenberg that exists.

From the The Social Network cast's appearance on El Hormiguero. It was pretty ridiculous.