The Universe

I used to think that I never wanted to age, and I wanted to stay young forever. Yes, kind of a Peter Pan complex. The truth is, I would love to be like....9 years old again. That was great. All you had to worry about was if your Mom remembered your fruit roll-ups at the grocery store, and whose house you were spending the night at that weekend. However, as the years tick by, it all goes downhill. Now, I would like to skip my roaring twenties and go right into my thirties where I have a career and a life path. It is all those in between years (like 9-30) that you spend having no idea what you should do with your life. People tell you all the time that you don't need to know yet. And then BAM. You need to know RIGHT NOW. Not necessarily what to do with eternity, but you certainly need to know what to do tomorrow. And the next day. The, "you don't need to know" thing is just a false sense of security. Then you wake up and you're 25 and could do anything from driving a UPS truck to giving rectal exams all day and you have no idea where to even start. I guess I can rule out the rectal exams, but you know what I mean. Then, when you finally decide to dabble in something, there is that whole barrier of actual qualifying and getting hired. Take my friend for example. She decided to do something, and has planned her entire immediate future around it, and then today she gets a "sorry, you weren't chosen" email. What the hell are we supposed to do with that? Not only does that make you feel totally rejected, you now have no plan. Instantly. Then it's back to the drawing board and deciding whether to sell lemonade or become an astronaut and you are just as lost as you were when you graduated from high school. Forget the added pressure of choosing the first catalyst for the rest of your life. I mean, one thing usually leads to another, and by that thought, whatever I choose now will lead to the next thing and the next. So, what if what I choose now seems great, but there is something greater that I don't even know could have existed. It's like those books that came out when I was in middle school where you could choose the ending by jumping to a certain page and there were like 4 options. My life is like one of those books. While you can say there is no wrong choice, there are certainly greater and lesser choices- and I will have no idea until I can look back at it all when I am 100 years old, and it's too late to do anything about it. Urgh. This is why people go back to school.