The Professor Plots Against Me

The Professor is tired of hearing me say that I feel vaguely unfulfilled. And she's demanding I do something about it, sit down and really figure out what I want from my life and go ahead and do it. This is a plan, of course, but I'm a giant chicken-shit. In high school I took a sociology class with the guy in charge of Athletics. I spent most of the class watching the back of the quarterback of our football team. In fact, I only remember two things from that class. One is when the teacher asked said quarterback and the rest of the football team how many of them wiped their bodies with their towels first and then their faces. They all did. He thought that was hilarious, that they would put something that had been on their butts on their faces. The other thing he'd talk about all the time is how none of us could really ever plan on succeeding at what we loved--that if we wanted to be a baseball player, we ought to satisfy ourselves with writing about baseball for the local paper or if we wanted to be movie stars, we should just satisfy ourselves with going to the movies. I thought that was kind of bullshit. I mean, sure, not everyone can pitch for the Cubs... well, okay... not the last few years anyway. Some years, sure. But back to my point, someone's got to do it. Right? I mean, someone's got to be the one person who overcomes the odds. I'm going to be honest with you. I thought he was wrong, but I think that's what I'm doing. I think I stick my knife in boxes full of books and then my nose in the pages of those freshly printed books and I tell myself this is exactly the job that would make me happiest because I don't have the balls to actually try to do what would make me happiest. Those boxes should be full of books full of pages full of inky shapes of my words. I know that. The Professor knows that. Fuck, even the Professor's brother knows that and he barely knows me. And yet, I read back over this post and I have to say that I barely have the balls to hit publish. I can barely admit this to myself. I don't know why the hell I'm telling you. I could try. I've got the perfect job for it, one that rewards artsy-fartsy yakkity-smakkity-ness and, without a car or kids, I have a lot of time in the evenings. It's not like I've never written anything before and if TCP has taught me anything it's the joy of having a routine of writing. But even writing it here, where I can stumble back across it in the future and hold myself accountable to it, to see if I actually did anything about it, is pretty terrifying. I don't know what will come of it--the admission, not the realization, or maybe the admission and the realization. But fuck me, if you don't come to Tiny Cat Pants to see what scares the shit out of me, I don't know why you come.