So.

I have one final left to take.

In only a few hours I will be done with my undergraduate course work.

It is, as they say, an end of an era. I have: made a few good friends, made a few horrible mistakes, had an epiphany, secured employment, received a cap and gown, and become so nervous about my last final that I don't know if the stomach is reacting to bad coffee or bad nerves.

As much as I want to be out of here, done with the school, done with the area, done with...everything. I don't want to leave.

Who am I without school?

While it should be easy enough to answer that question by the one person most qualified, I have trouble coming up with a quick accurate answer. Yes, I'm a hard worker. Yes I am a religious individual. Yes, I enjoy helping people. Yes, I like trying new things. No, I don't like meeting new people. Yes, I am a conservative.

True, that is me to the core. But...it isn't me. Throughout my entire life I have been around schools. Ma is a teacher, her friends are teachers, my friends folks were teachers, or active in the school in some way... School is what I know. And yet, I don't want to teach. I really don't. I want to coach, and I want to help people understand what they want in life. I understand that the idea of teaching, and the idea of what I want to do aren't incompatible ideas. But, kids annoy me. Maybe because I always hung out with older kids, or kids my same age, I never learned to experience the joy that most people seem to have with children. Maybe I'm just cold-hearted.

So the question remains...

Who am I without school?

I don't want to stay in school. I don't want to teach.

Yet

I don't want to leave school. I don't want to teach.

I'm just now asking this question, and assuredly I am kicking myself for waiting so long to ask it, what am I going to do with my life? And how is it right that we have to decide the answer to that question when we are at the impressionable age of 13? At 13, I wanted to teach. I wanted to be a PE teacher with all my heart. Then seven years later much as a famine struck Egypt, uncertainty struck me. Sadly, there was no Joseph who helped store up food, and my belief structure crumbled slightly. Seven years wasted. At least as far as course work was concerned.

So now I've fallen back to my second love, history. I've got a job at a museum, and the only thing standing between me, and my job is this last test.

So.

Come what may, cause no matter what, I can't change the past.

I should probably take this final.