great expectations

One thing I was thinking about yesterday, when my stomach hurt and I was feeling like Not Working, was what an unmotivated slob I've become since essentially dropping out of a nurse practitioner program two years ago. (And then, the Magic Nursing Fairy called and sprinkled Fairy Dust--no, that's not like angel dust--all over my day by saying I didn't have to go to work, because we had practically no patients.)

It's like, if I could do it all over again, here's what I'd do:

Plan B: Or, How Jamie Could Have Ended Up Just Like She Is Today, Except Without All The Student Loan Debt, And In About Half the Time:

1) Blow off highschool like everyone else who had any common sense did.
2) Go to community college. For a semester.
3) Drop out of community college, and work some crappy job.
4) Go back to a state university for a Bachelor in Something Useful, like nursing, or religion. Oh wait, nursing isn't useful!

Or even the industrious Plan C:

1) Go directly to college. Do not pass Go. Do not get a master's degree. Do not drop out of a second master's degree program.

Because I could have saved myself thousands of dollars by doing it the alternate slacker way (as opposed to the expensive slacker way I did college) and what good did investing in a six figure education do for me, any way?

I still have as much earning power as I did under Life Plan A, where I noodled around incessantly for nearly a decade spending thousands of dollars--while ironically, living in sheer poverty--accruing pointless degrees and having people say, "What are you going to do with that degree, any way?" (After about the fifth time you hear that in one week alone, you start silently thinking, "Shove it up your ass, if you ask me that question one more time.")

At least no one asks what you're going to do with a nursing degree.

On the one hand, I find if the nursing job is good, I can be happy with what I do for a living. I mean, I love my job now. Nice nurses, nice staff, mostly nice patients. It's like I died and went to WunderHospital. I could see doing this for a little while longer, if nothing else, to get those Perkins loans canceled (three. more. years. of. indentured. servitude. three. more. years.)

But, on the other hand, I feel like there's all this sort of external pressure--probably completely imaginary--to do something with my life.

Like, I could go back to school, and get an advanced degree in nursing, and probably have as much earning power as I do now.

Or, I could even get a PhD.

Or, I could just jump off a tall building, and save every one the agony of having to listen to me bitch for five years about how much the degree program sucked, etc.

Also, I kind of did school for a very, very long time, and I'm burned out even thinking about applying for another program. Like, it would take five weeks just to sort out all the places from which I'd have to request transcripts.

I hate applying for schools. You always have to write this essay in which you have to say things like, "I love your school and program so very very much that I've dreamed about supplicating to your admissions board since I was a wee tot of three, and I plan to name my future children in honor of your institution. I promise, if you let me into your program, I will be the best intellectual slave you ever, ever had!"

I don't know. I wrote a lot of those essays. And spent time revising them. And begging people to read them. And rewriting them. And begging people to read them again, until those people seemed to go on extended vacations or run screaming whenever I drew near.

This essay-writing is time I could have spent doing much more useful, fun things, like picking my nose, or sleeping.

Also, you have to pretend you're interesting in researching things. I am not really interested in academic research. I just like to use google a lot, and I don't think that counts as a scholarly source.

And I'm too lazy and short-attention-spanned to write an entire thesis on something, and if I did, it'd be some "soft" multidisciplinary crap at which real scientists turn their noses up in disdain.

Maybe I'm much too scatterbrained, not to mention complacent any more to do anything Hard Core Academic. I don't know how these Super People I know like, work 40 hours a week and go to school and change constitutional law and do triathalons, and I can't seem to do one simple thing at a time, like either go to school, and stay put for more than two years, or go to work, and stay put for more than three months.