?

When meeting new people I usually get asked what I am studying. When I answer creative writing, eight and half times out of ten the sub-question, "What are you going to do with that?" then follows. Ten times out of ten I want to answer become a doctor or start a restaurant or coach women’s volleyball or tell them they have three guesses. I suppose it is not that stupid of a question. I guess you could write about sports for the newspaper or essays for some magazine. There are novels and poetry. What pisses me off about this question is that I don't know the answer.

There are three ways one can go about deciding what he or she wants to study. The first would be to decide what you want to do for a career and then study the courses to help you do that. Second, just start taking different kinds of classes until you find something you like. The third, and the path I chose, would be to find what would make school the least miserable and go with that. When I found that there was actually a creative writing major I knew that it was what I wanted to study, and I knew where I wanted to study; of course that school didn't have a CW major so I went to a different school. I realized after that I definitely wanted to be a writer.

Now, I am not naive (at least I like to think that I am not entirely) and I realize that the chances of me being able to be a full-time writer are slim, and that I will more than likely always have a job that doesn't have to do with writing at all. "But this is America," you say, "you can be anything you want to be." Or so they say, but remember, only one person out of millions get to be the American Idol. So if your dream is to become the American Idol, at best you have a .0000005% chance of accomplishing your goal. There are more writers than American Idols, but I am sure you get my point. I am confident, however; I am just trying to find the line between reality and stupidity.

I learned quickly not to answer this question with an I don't know, because then the asker (usually a stranger) either gives me a weird look that says, "How can you not know?" or tries to help me figure it out by giving suggestions. Thanks for being nice and all, but shut up. I have also figured out that saying I would like to write stories is not acceptable either.

"What kind of stories? Non-fiction or fiction?"

"Probably both."

"What would you write about when writing non-fiction?"

"About when I was in the peace-core and lived in Yemen for a year," or "My triumph over brain cancer."

"Really?"

"No."

Only a certain kind of person has their life all figured out and laid down nicely waiting for them to get on with it at twenty-three. Shame on you for making me think that I should be one of them.