Quick Aside - Reboot

This is a blog. By definition it is a log of my thoughts and feelings. It's supposed to blend both my learnings and my personal happenings. Lately, it's been feeling a bit academic, a bit impersonal. So I'm going to share a story of this evening and many previous evenings.

I realized that this class terrifies me. Less so because of the content, although this particular mode of thinking is new to me so sometimes the writings are more a morass than, well, poetry. It is more so scary because of the idea that the class embodies. It is a capstone. It is a culmination. A marking of my time as an undergraduate coming to an end. This is the part that terrifies me. The ending part. The graduating part.

I'm not supposed to be here. I'm not supposed to be graduating. Seriously, I started in on college thinking I was here for the short-run. The same day I walked into the offices of the Arts and Letters department with a full application, I also walked into a Target Box store looking for what I thought at the time was long term employment. I figured college was going to go as the rest of my schooling had gone. As a sidebar to a rather useless life.

I was never very academically (or future) minded. I graduated from high school with a 2.1 or so GPA and came to MSU because is was close enough to Billings such that I could run to my family if something went wrong, but it was far enough away to not be Billings. I started in to art school because the prospect of doing papers and sitting in class rooms made me want to kill myself. One of those still does. But there's been growth between now and then. More on that later though.

I took an English class from Amy Thomas my sophomore year. It was the only A I earned that entire semester. It was her 19th century literature class. In the interim I was taking a painting class, a sculpture class, and some core classes. At this point, I was also neck high on a drug binge. Looking back, those first two years of college were kind of a waste. And kind of some of the most valuable time I spent up here. Mainly because I now perceive it as a waste.

I don't really know when but at some point I decided that I cared about school and the future. It might have been a slow moving epiphany-- a long drawn out Ahhhhh that both involved my wallet and my brain. So I stopped doing drugs. I stopped making weekly runs to Missoula to pick up my little pouch. I started reading in my spare time. Started learning how to think. I was tired of the stupid crap that had made me apathetic. Because that's what I had become, apathetic.

Now here I am. About to graduate. What the hell? I'm not entirely sure how this happened. Now I care about school. Now I care about the future. But this class still scares me. I think it should. I think the future is scary, no matter how the dust flies off my past and how each of my rose-leaves guides me down my regrets and triumphs and perceived futures, the unknown will always be scary. Just as the awesome is scary, and the magnanimity of time is awesome.

I think it's a good thing. A little fear can go a long way. Keeps me humble. Keeps me grounded and looking up and back and forward.

Anyway, there's my digression. I know it's self indulgent and I am pretty damn sure nobody really cares. But I needed to get this out there. I will post my more relevant things tomorrow.