Sophomore year is about twice as much work as freshman year, half as much expectation, and about a quarter the hope. Oh, and there’s that pig fever going around. What is it? Porcine ebola? Something like that.

I remember stepping onto campus, confident that I was going to turn everything around, succeed in things I had never succeeded in before. College picked me up by my letter jacket (it gets cold in Austin too. This might be the single most expensive piece of clothing I own, so I guilt myself into wearing it more than would be fashionably appropriate), set me down on a patch of lawn that will never grow grass because a) bird are hungry and b) there are a lot of birds, and set me straight on the facts. A difficult part of college is the expectation that you will major in something that will turn into a career directly. You are literally studying a career, and then you will enter an industry. There’s a sort of comfort in this. Your path is predetermined, but not necessarily regimented. When I thought I finally found direction at the end of last semester, mired in chemical formulas I never wanted to see again, and English papers I slaved over but completely missed the point on, I guess all I found was a justification for my state of mind.

So I changed my state of mind. I’m going to spend my four years here studying something I love — not something I barely tolerate, not some means that will justify my preferred end. Then I’ll spend another four years perfecting it. After that, I might spend another three years on a fancy title (Baroness, please). When it comes to work, I could teach or act (badly) or live in an attic writing whimsical poems about hornets (I don’t like hornets, but I’ll try). The point is that I don’t feel pressure any more to find something to do that glorifies me, but at the very least dignifies me. And there are so many things I can do with that outlook.

So maybe there’s a little more hope going around this year than I initially thought. I’ll be back with a much geekier post once these thoughts have run their course! Oh yeah, and watch out for pigs. Much more dangerous than hog rabies.