The Future

Still don't know what I'm doing in three months, but I know what I'm not doing. Teach For America didn't offer me a final interview. ACE still hasn't gotten back to me, but I don't have high hopes for that one anymore. I took the GRE in September, never got my results, called, still didn't get them, called again, still didn't get them. I ended up sending my scores up to Notre Dame without ever having seen them. Finally got them in the mail yesterday, and they're--abysmal. The ACE office is probably gonna laugh and toss my application in the trash. I can't even blame 'em.

I'm more okay with these developments than I thought I'd be. Knowing that I tried to help save the world is just as morally uplifting as spending two years doing it.

I feel like I've spent my entire life with people just a little bit better than me. As great a school as Cistercian is, I was in the bottom half of my class for six years. I'm doing okay at UT, but because I'm in Plan II, the "elite" are still the only people I know - they're smarter than I am, they write better than I do, they're cleverer than I am. Not by a lot, but by enough for it to matter.

That's why I like copy editing so much, I think. I KNOW grammar. It's my forte, it's what I'm good at. People ask me questions and I shoot the answer back without looking up from the Wikipedia article I'm reading. I can plow through eight RIM stories in an hour, and when I'm done, you can scriptset that shit. I make mistakes, sure, but 99% of them come from carelessness, not ignorance. The confidence I feel when I'm adding commas and em dashes and restructuring sentences is something I haven't felt in a long time, if ever.

So--that's what I want to do with my life. Not copy editing, per se, but something where I'm not second-guessing myself on a daily basis. TFA and ACE take the best of the best, and even if I eke my way in, it'll just be more of the same. I'll still be busting my ass to break into the middle of the pack while the guy in front exudes apathetic arrogance and talks about how EASY everything is.

I guess I just want to be that guy. For once.