Boredom and life...

God, I'm spending more time online than I wish I did. It's probably because the summer is winding down and most of my friends have gone back to full-work, or are getting ready to go back to school, so... Gah...

Sometimes I wish I was going to school. Sometimes I wish I was working on my education, but then I have to wonder, what the hell am I going to prepare for, when I can't yet decide what the hell I wanna do with my life? When I graduated high school, everyone around me seemed to have a plan. Everyone was either going to be a doctor or a lawyer, or some kind of engineer, or a business manager, or an architect, or even something as boring and depressing as an accountant, and I remember being one of those people.

I wanted to become a lawyer when I graduated high school. The idea of it made me feel rather enthused, and thinking about it rationally, it was really something that made sense, and I never thought it would be difficult to me, something that I was able to confirm a few months later, when I actually went to college and started working towards my law degree. Rationally speaking, it was a good choice. But then I realized that reason and emotion don't go hand-in-hand. I realized that I didn't really wanna a be a lawyer, and I dropped out.

And ever since then, this is what I've been doing. Working, wasting time online, living a life that I don't really want to live, but what else am I to do? If I could decide what I want to do with my life and say "hey, this is what I'm going to work on and I'll like it", then that's what I'd be doing, but my mind doesn't really work like that. I can't decide on anything. I like a lot of stuff, but I can't say I feel especially passionate about something, and I don't wanna waste more college tuition fees on aimlessly testing the waters, so to speak.

So instead, I'm sitting here on a late summer night, typing this blog. And it sucks, because I feel like I should be doing something. I should be working towards something instead of having a half-assed job that I don't care about. Maybe I should travel to see if that clears my head.

What do you think?

Unemployed Graduate Sues College

NEW YORK (AFP) - A US student who recently graduated from New York's Monroe College said Monday she had filed a complaint with the school accusing it of being responsible for her inability to find work.

Trina Thompson, 27, who graduated with a degree in information technology in April at the school in northern Manhattan's Bronx district, asked the state supreme court to award her 70,000 dollars to reimburse the tuition costs.

The former student said she had been unable to find employment to support herself since graduation.

"I need full-time job placement and that's what they said they were going to help me with and they didn't," Thompson told NY1 television.

"The IT career counselor sent me about three emails saying 'Oh, I have this job opening, you should apply for it.' That's it."

A Monroe College spokesman said the lawsuit was "completely without merit."

Honestly? That's one giant act of desperation right there. Seriously, it's pretty pathetic. I've heard of people who blame their financial troubles on W, on Obama, on illegal immigrants, on the War on Terror, on Wallstreet, on the Banks, even on Europe and Asia. But this has got to be the first time for me that I find a person with the nerve to blame their situation on their education, and the institution that provided it for them.

To me it feels very ungrateful, because first of all, your ability to find a job depends solely on yourself, degree or no degree. And second, her school has absolutely no obligation whatsoever with her after graduation (yet, they were still trying to help her somehow, which is nice, really, and all they got was a slap in the face).

Seriously. Instead of wasting time filing lawsuits she should be filling résumés. This girl needs a reality check.

You can find the original article here.

Work to live or live to work?

I know today's entry is kind of a late one, but I was busy all day doing stuff, and no, it wasn't work-related stuff, I was simply hanging out with a few acquaintances I hadn't seen or heard from in a while, as well as with my parents. In fact, the only reason why I'm home right now is to take a shower and change into something more fitting for the nightly atmosphere that I'll be diving into with the aforementioned friends in about an hour. If it wasn't for that I probably wouldn't have been able to write a blog today and my thus far perfect record of writing at least an entry a day would've been ruined, so yeah... random, much? I don't really know how I got here, as this isn't really what I want to talk about.

What I want to talk about comes from something that happened just a few minutes ago. I was driving home, just a few moments away from my doorstep, when I got a call from one of my oldest friends. I haven't seen him in a while due to our hectic schedules, so he wanted to know if I could spare some time to hang out with him sometime this week. My response, of course, was to tell him that we should hang out now, seeing as I was bound to meet all the guys tonight. I had expected him to say yes, buy as it turns out, today, Saturday, he was working, and he's still working; his shift won't be over 'till around midnight, at which time he will take an hour-long drive to get to his home, to sleep for around five to six hours, get up, shower, dress and head back out to work half a shift tomorrow morning.

When he told me that, I asked him right away if he was short of money (I know it's a bit rude, but that's the way me and my friends are with each other), but again, while expecting confirmation I was sorely disappointed. It's not an extra shift, it's just the way his work... well, works.

Obviously he gets a couple days off during the week and whatnot, but still, this got me thinking. I wouldn't take a job, no matter how good the pay may be, that precluded me from having some time to hang out with my friends and family every once in a while. Because the point of having a job, at least from my perspective, at this point in life, shouldn't be regarded as nothing more than a means to an end, a way to get by. If you want to have a career, that's fine, but you have to allow yourself some time to just live. For most people that's college, but my friend chose not to go to college, instead getting straight into working, and I feel like he's missing out on some things.

The age that we're in right now -- our early 20's -- is supposed to be a time of self-discovery. And I know it sounds a bit corny, but I really do believe that. This is the time when we learn who he are and what we want to become, and I feel that by constraining yourself with tight work schedules and routine, you risk stifling that process, and while you might not think much of it right now, ten or fifteen years down the line there's a very good chance you'll wake up one morning and realize that the life that you have is not the one you wanted, and then, it might be a bit too late to do something about it, and you're going to have to live with that.

I don't want to do that. I don't want to have that kind of regret. So instead of living to work like my friend seems to be doing, I rather see what life is like, and work is just a small part of the equation. There'll be time to chain myself to a career three or four years from now, but at the moment, I just want to work to live.