I recently finished  reading this article - http://nymag.com/news/features/my-generation-2011-10/ - and started to question many things about life, the universe, and the answer to everything. 

A lot of the article discusses something that I am currently dealing with; so, a quick back story before I begin.  In high school I was not the most popular, I was not the most athletic, and I was also not the smartest in my class. Yet I was definitely not the cast out, I was always active in athletics, and I had a pretty decent GPA (part of the top 25%).  My dreams in life were pretty modest; I just wanted to go to college and do what I loved for a living. I was fine with not being famous, and never being exorbitantly rich. 

My 10 year plan broke down something like this; go to college, get into a good job with lots of promotion opportunities (where I could work my way up), find someone I love to share it with, get married, travel. In general I think that's a lot of people's plan. I don't think that, contrary to what that article states, we all felt entitled to greatness. Okay yeah sure, in some of my dreams I'd be the art director of Rolling Stone or Spin, living in NYC and being awesome in general. But I was not so deluded to believe that was ever actually going to happen. 

But now I'm starting to question whether my, originally modest, plan was asking for too much. In fact, am I still asking for too much? When I lost my job in 2008 I re-examined my life and what I wanted out of it, but the original goals still held. So now I'm in graduate school pursuing the original dream of doing something I love as a job and just hoping that I can find it when I get out.  Maybe that's the wrong view, maybe I just have to deal with the fact, that in these current times, we all won't get to do what we love. Maybe that's the dream that we can no longer afford to believe will come true.  Am I in college just waiting to end up in the same place where I began, only 3 years older?

The kicker is that today I received a phone call from my temp agency saying that a possible job believes that I'm overqualified to work for them. That, if I were to work for them, I'd be bored. I almost laughed. Of course I'd be bored but to deny someone a job because they thing I won't love every minute of it? Whose really the deluded one?

it's getting to be about that time... so as thoughts come to me i will probably start posting pretty things that i want again.

likkeee... a nice winter jacket.

I came across a VERY horrible remark made in an lj comm and then people actually DEFENDED HIM. it was ridiculous.

So in an effort to (probably hoplessly) express my view I used an excerpt from a speech that changed my thinking on A LOT of things.

"When we talk about racism, we have to see that we are not just talking about acts against blacks, we are talking about vulgarities against any human being because of her -- his -- race. This is vulgar. That is what it is, whether it is anti-Asian, whether it is the use of racial pejoratives about Jews, about Japanese, about Native Americans, about blacks, about Irish, it is stupid, because what it is really is it is poison. It poisons the spirit, the human spirit. I know there are blacks who say, "I can use the N-word because I mean it endearingly." I don't believe that. I believe it is vulgar and dangerous, given from any mouth to any ear. I know that if poison is in a vial which says P-O-I-S-O-N and has a skull and the cross bones, that it is poison. But if you pour the same thing into Bavarian crystal it is still poison. So I think racism is vulgar any way you cut it."

this interview has a lot of excerpts from that speech. and it's an amazing read if you're interested