With six days to the move I find myself awake, after three hours of what would be best described as a full body shutdown.\u00c2\u00a0 The stress, the frantic running around, the bureaucratic shuffle with UofL, it all caught up with me today, during my last day of work at the Office Depot in Paducah.\u00c2\u00a0 I spent most of my day in a daze, wandering, thinking, feeling and shutting off conscious thought, to the point of stopping mid-sentence with customers a few times.<\/p>\n
A week ago, I was thinking.\u00c2\u00a0 It was a driving, frenzied sort of train of thought that left sleep totally out of the equation.\u00c2\u00a0 So at 4 in the morning, I pour myself some coffee and sit down with the dogs, thinking about the future.<\/p>\n
The conscious act of deciding what to do for the next 20 to 30 years is massive.\u00c2\u00a0 To ponder that act is itself even more terrifying.<\/p>\n
Computer Engineering and Computer Science.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s what it says on my transcript.\u00c2\u00a0 A field I couldn’t honestly tell you why I selected.\u00c2\u00a0 Actually that’s a lie, I know exactly why:\u00c2\u00a0 Money.\u00c2\u00a0 Prestige, comfort, security.\u00c2\u00a0 Materialism.\u00c2\u00a0 While I consider myself something of an expert with these machines I have no aspiration to shepherd a farm of servers for the rest of my life.\u00c2\u00a0 Nor do I, if I am honest with myself, want to be a database administrator.\u00c2\u00a0 I picked Oracle because it was the richest database to master.\u00c2\u00a0 Though some of you wouldn’t expect it of me, my favorite thing to do with these things is design things.\u00c2\u00a0 Not even cool stuff like models, but flyers and advertisements and stuff.\u00c2\u00a0 Graphic Design is even a little too binding a term because I’m not much of an artist, but the act (the art?) of laying out an ad I find to be a unique sort of challenge every time.\u00c2\u00a0 Given a choice between this and web design, I would still do layouts.\u00c2\u00a0 Why?\u00c2\u00a0 Nothing against the actual act of designing web pages, it’s a guilty pleasure.\u00c2\u00a0 I’ve repeatedly told others that if I can sketch a website on paper I can code it.\u00c2\u00a0 No, the problem is the bane of all web designers.\u00c2\u00a0 Interoperability, cross-platform support, all the buzzwords for making one website look the same on every browser.\u00c2\u00a0 Would it go against convention to say that this shouldn’t be something I should have to worry about?\u00c2\u00a0 Probably.<\/p>\n
But even after all that, everything I just wrote takes a backseat to another passion.\u00c2\u00a0 From an early age, I’ve had a love affair with the English language.\u00c2\u00a0 The subtle intricacies always draw me in; if I were to indulge and cast myself into the crucible of this romance I would have no room to live for all the books I would own.\u00c2\u00a0 I have never been a scientist of the language (should I say, a lexiconologist?)\u00c2\u00a0 Instead, the sequence, the grammar, it’s always had an unmistakable flow.\u00c2\u00a0 I don’t think I could diagram a sentence if I tried.\u00c2\u00a0 But an English degree?\u00c2\u00a0 What does that do for you?\u00c2\u00a0 Many of my friends from high school are pursuing degrees in Journalism, and good for them.\u00c2\u00a0 And despite the fact that my writings on here could pass for journalism depending on the point of view, the thought of sitting in a newsroom hammering away at an article with, say, an hour to spare before the deadline…that does not appeal to me.\u00c2\u00a0 I don’t like writing under pressure, hell, half the time I feel like I don’t like writing at all.<\/p>\n
It was during this reverie that my mind kept going back to high school, to English class with Mr. Quertermous.\u00c2\u00a0 A great man, and a great teacher.<\/p>\n
I wanted to be a teacher.<\/p>\n
If it weren’t for him, I think my high school career would have gone completely off course.\u00c2\u00a0 He gave advice and knowledge in equal amounts, his presence was a source of comfort.\u00c2\u00a0 He listened, and reached out to children that many teachers would have, and some already had, given up on.\u00c2\u00a0 If I could illuminate minds as he did mine, the materialism falls away and I am left with more abstract, but equally powerful things.\u00c2\u00a0 Pride, contentment.\u00c2\u00a0 Satisfaction.\u00c2\u00a0 Altruism is unlike me, or is it?\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe beneath the exterior of a cynic and confirmed skeptic is a man that only wants to better those around him.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, if I’m going to become a teacher, I’ve wasted a lot<\/em> of time and a lot<\/em> of money going down a path that many courses will not transfer from.\u00c2\u00a0 But, as I’ve been told, there was a lot of experience down the path as well, and that counts for something.<\/p>\n I have nine days until the return to the University of Louisville, two months of class, and come August…the decision will have to be made.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" With six days to the move I find myself awake, after three hours of what would be best described as a full body shutdown.\u00c2\u00a0 The stress, the frantic running around, the bureaucratic shuffle with UofL, it all caught up with me today, during my last day of work at the Office Depot in Paducah.\u00c2\u00a0 I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-71","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1RwV4-19","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/danieltharp.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/danieltharp.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/danieltharp.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danieltharp.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danieltharp.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/danieltharp.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/danieltharp.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danieltharp.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danieltharp.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}