In Catholic school, as vicious as Roman rule…
There is wind here, and sunlight, and trees… Any place so beautiful could not be such a bad place to live. Norman is gracefully lovely, in its small city sort of way, with the barely hidden disdain the residents have for the college students. I like it here, I’m happy all in all. Is this the place I want to be for the next five years?
I ask myself that question and I can’t imagine myself wanting to be anywhere, geographically speaking, in five years. There are little romantics wanderings that tell me that five years from this moment I should be cleaning up from the post-church lunch my family ate… But I suppose that’s a bit further down the line than five years.
What do I want to do with my life?
Live well.
But how?
Success, family, happiness.
But HOW?
Love, dedication, luck.
These are the sort of perfectly logical but evasive answers I give myself when trying to plan for my future. I don’t want to become a lawyer for women’s agencies, I think… I’m too passionate. Work should be sterile, challenging but not gripping.
Family should be flour flying in the air from pancake batter messy, stories and kisses goodnight warm, waking up next to someone you love soft, and I could die for you passionate.
I don’t need a job I love, just something that will pay the bills and keep me interested. I want to be a lawyer, this much I know, but where? Of what sort?
This summer, I realized how much I love to learn language. Any language, every language, and I feel sad because I want to take German, Italian, Russian, French, Spanish, and anything else I can get my hands on… I want to spend all of my time in grammar, translation, teasing out the meaning… I love to learn about feminism and philosophy, it’s true, but I don’t want to advocate women’s rights like I want to see every single part of the world, express every feeling in every language that can be used to express.
Where do I want to learn to be a lawyer? At OU? That would be free, which would be very nice… But there are so many other schools that I think I could get into and might look so much better.
My dream schools, at this point are University of Michigan, Oxford, and Cambridge. I’m sure next year I’ll apply to a whole slew of schools, Harvard Law, and Chicago U, and Yale, and Princeton… I’m sure that I’ll get accepted to one or two. Where do I want to be in 5 years? I have no idea.
I know that this summer, this city is too much for me… I miss my sisters, and my mommy, and all my aunts and uncles. I miss the feeling of Las Vegas, the resounding anonymity. Being in a city geared toured tourism is a constant reminder that we are always coming and going, nothing is ever permanent. Norman has gotten so heavy with meaning for me, I take it all too seriously it feels terribly and utterly real and not at all transient. I need to escape for a week, be with people I love and who love me back unconditionally. I need to see Elaine, Becca, Liz, Shari…
Being here has gotten so bad for me, so far from self knowledge and so caught up in the feeling of being free. Behaving as the wind that flees, not the water that reflects.
Do you ever wonder if the wind gets tired of running and wants to stop, just to look?