Keys and Lightbulbs

This morning, while eating my mushy banana and 'American-style' peanut butter, a light bulb went on in my head. Of course, if you've known me for any length of time, you probably know that light bulbs go on and off in my brain with the frequency of a strobe light in a discotheque.

Nevertheless, this light bulb went on which was good because I'd been sitting in the dark for a long, long time.

Whenever people tell me they're going to graduate school for creative writing, I always think it's the goofiest thing. I mean, can you think of a less practical subject to study in graduate school? But here's the thing I recently learned: a lot of people go for free. And sometimes they even get paid. They get to write all day long and get feedback on their writing and work with this community of other writers and they sometimes get paid for it.

What?!

Of course, at the end you just have an MFA in Creative Writing which might come in handy some day if you run out of toilet paper but the point is that you probably grow, like, way a lot as a writer, right? And sometimes it's free!

So, anyway, that was my light bulb.

And now I almost officially do not want to go to law school which kind of makes me want to throw up if I say it out loud, which I haven't yet.

I mean, here's the part that I left out of yesterday's "wah wah I don't know if I want to be a lawyer" post. I left out this part because I was embarrassed but maybe I'll just tell you now anyway.

Ever since I was a little kid, I've thought that someday I'd be a Writer (whatever that even means) but it was always something I could put off like losing weight or learning how to play guitar. Like someday I might wake up and miraculously have an idea for the next Great American Novel (or even the next Mediocre American Novel) and until then I could just keep doing whatever else to bide my time.

But law school isn't biding your time. Law school is making a commitment to one possibility (for at least probably 8-10 years) and sending all of those other possibilities up to Possibility Heaven.

And that's really what it comes down to. I've been mourning the death of possibilities.

Paris has awakened something, I think, or maybe Paris is just where I happened to be when the thing woke up on its own. Things feel possible here that never felt possible anywhere else. And I feel a little more grown up, too, although that's hard to explain. I feel more ready somehow but I'm not sure what it is I'm ready for.

So this is what I'm thinking. I'm thinking maybe spend a year working somewhere and save money and take the GRE and apply to graduate school. I am, like, awesome at applying to schools now. I have a hard time thinking of a worse place to save money than New York but I'm thinking I might move there anyway because I don't want to scrap everything at once. I want to keep at least part of the plan.

And I don't need to go to the world's most prestigious graduate school. That's the beauty of a toilet paper MFA: no one's going to care anyway. I just need to go somewhere free or very cheap, somewhere that I'd like to live for a little while, somewhere that I like the professors, and somewhere that hopefully doesn't make me go back to the good people who wrote my law school letters of recommendation. Eep.

Of course, there's something else in all of this and if you've known me for awhile, this something else may have already occurred to you. I say 'no' to things a lot. Most people have a hard time saying 'no' but I could teach a graduate-level course on the subject. I say 'no' to schools, I say 'no' to jobs, I say 'no' to relationships, I say 'no' to Istanbul... ok, I've only said 'no' to Istanbul once but the point is: I say 'no' all the time.

And if I'm honest with myself (which I rarely am, I suspect), I'll admit that I get a kind of high from saying 'no'. There's something weirdly exhilarating about saying 'no' to something to which it should be really difficult to say 'no'. It's an active decision, it's a strong statement, and there's something that always feels so (deceptively?) right about an active, strong decision.

So there's that.

And maybe that's what I'm doing for the hundredth time. And maybe I'll do it a hundred times more until I'm old and grey and alone with fifteen cats and a life full of no's to wrap around me like a quilt.