soapboxdiner

Happy

* Fade in. SBD walks into a venerable building with wood-lined halls filled with exceptional minds that burst with creative fire. She hears her humble footsteps echo through the hush of respectful silence. Before her, an amphitheatric round rises, which she hurriedly mounts to take her seat before the lecture commences. And her mind expands. *

Except the venerable halls are really just half-heartedly waxed linoleum, and the lecture hall is really just a room filled with too-small Barbie seats positioned beneath water-stained corrugated ceiling tiles in a closet-sized, bland-white-cum-beige community college classroom.

So much for caviar dreams for a Harvard education. Instead, my $1000 pays for a quarterly part-time, box-top degree in My Professor is Overworked and Underpaid.

Funny, though. As obviously strained as Prof. is, the material he's chosen satiates that need in me that has been deadened for soooo long now, I thought it was gone forever. And I eagerly announce my excitement, "Hey, guys! Wanna talk about Dead People? I know Milton and I know Dante. Me and Augustine used to hang at the Kitty Cat Club, wanna dish?!?!" Which is all well and good, except for none of it is all the way true, and most of it is bullshit.

By the way, I happen to hold bullshit in the highest esteem, but only if it's my own.

And the more especially funny thing is, I'm completely and utterly exhausted. Low Blood Iron? Not enough reruns of Scrubs? Who knows. T-I-R-E-D. And the kids in class are unimpressed by my enthusiasm (except for the ones that skip class; they, in turn, just want to email me for session synopses because they chose not to attend, not to in any way imply that my vested energies in providing elucidation has yet been met with a thank you.)

But I read new authors and think new thoughts and I want to share them with you, and You, and YOU! I am on fire and in love and alive again, and I want to share all this ecstatic Top-Ramen-fed vibrancy with another human soul that will joyfully share in my wonderment.

But there is no one there.

Two months ago my only pulse was the fibrillations of a frightened, over-stressed and under-considered corporate employee.

Flash forward, today I'm an under-utilized, completely unstressed -- shutyomouth, bored -- employee who has temporarily renounced Wall Street in order to pursue another career via hybrid college courses taught by overworked professors whose teaching styles I consciously resist the urge to castigate or correct. They are doing the very best they can, I am positive. It is not for me to define, but to emulate and learn as best I can. Even if we're more than halfway through the quarter and we've yet to receive but one graded paper in return. How am I to measure the success of my self-guided learning (that I paid $1000 to initiate), if not from professorial review?

None the less, here I am. And in my more rested, relaxed mind, I reflect back on those hectic days filled with variety and necessitity and all their small importances, and I ache to reincarnate my sense of satisfaction in them. I was important once. I filled a void that no one else could fill quite like I did. Today I am anonymous, with all the freedom that entails. It has a certain Taoist beauty, being humble. But I have to say, it's not very practical.

And so today I stand in that long-familiar crossroads: Bohemian soul mired in well-founded fear of financial reality. I await physical re-enervation that matches my secret, inside excitement. I wish for external embodiment of excitement to enervate my Damn-Its-Six-AM-itude. I long for the wisdom required to understand the full commitment required for either extreme: Student life is sleepless and broke; Professional Life is soulless but profitable. Pick your poison, darlings, and do it with a smile.

Doesn't there have to be a better way? Please tell me the world is not so stymied, that someone, somewhere is elsewise ...

Well, I'll let you fill in the blank. Again, my heart and soul are happy, despite my otherwise sluggish mind.

7:40 pm - 11.03.10
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