Aimlessness, or how I learned to love Gore Vidal

I, like most of the people in the age group that I currently reside, have no real idea what it is I want to do with my life. Really, I guess I know what I'm in school for, and I guess I know what it is I will be doing once I graduate (whenever that is), but nonetheless, I still feel cut apart and drifting. After all, I currently reside in Lubbock, TX (though I am writing this on the last day of a week long trip to NYC) and Lubbock is really an entire town that has an aimless feeling to it. This encompasses the empty, hollow West Texas wind that blows through the town, sometimes lazily, sometimes forcefully, to the occasional smell of cow shit that wafts into the city with, the tiny bits of cotton, from the farms that encircle and lay siege to this city.

School for me involves studying History so that I might someday stand before the teenage brats of my peers and have them adamantly not listen to a word that comes out of my mouth. Oh, of course I have dreams of being that teacher, the one that students speak well about and idolize till, well, till its time to send their own kids to me for their further edification. That I could change a High Schooler's life to such a degree would be amazing for me. However, the truth of the matter is that I will be teaching history, the least beloved and easiest class to fall asleep to. Every other class, the teacher has the chance to live vicariously through their students. If you're a science teacher, for instance, and you have a student who is really good at science, you can tell that student of all the awesome things that he/she could do that would make her famous. You would of course have the secret hope that when they are up at the podium for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, they would mention that awesome teacher they had in High School, the one that turned their life around and put them on the right wholesome path.

That doesn't work on my level. If I end up with a really promising history student, the best I can say is, "Well, your really good at this! If you continue to work hard and study, go to a good college, get your degree, you could get a job doing... well.... uh... I guess.... well, you'll be doing the exact same thing I am. Quick child! Run! Go be good at something else, history will never get you laid!"

Of course, this is all just a long winded way of welcoming you to this blog I started, despite my inborn fear of these things from the older livejournalesque embarrassing days of my youth. But, there is a reason that I got this, a real reason even, one dedicated to the building of underused skills that have atrophied in myself for far to long. I want to write. That is to say that I have the dream of writing, of being published, of fulfilling the unlikely goal of being the most highly acclaimed history writer since Barbara Tuchmann. I have ideas for books that constantly show themselves inside my head. I want to pull a classic modern history writer transition and write articles about political and social commentary. I want to be Gore Vidal. That is what this is for, a place for me to practice. Nothing more.