Out in Left-Centre Field

Been a while, hasn't it?

Once again, I've been lax at keeping up this blog. I could go into the myriad assignments and projects and demands and commitments that university continues to visit upon my life, but it's probably best if I spare you that can of worms.

On the upside, the light at the end of the tunnel approaches. Freedom is nigh! If all goes well I will be finished at the end of this term (well, after a field course in Peru that runs into May), and after eighteen straight years of schooling I'll finally have ... wait for it ... a piece of paper and a bunch of little letters I can put after my name (B.A.Sc. to be exact) to tell people that I might be competent enough to be a real engineer someday. Can you tell I'm feeling a little anticlimactic?

In other words, I'll finally have my life back. And it scares me half to hell.

Because what am I going to do? For eighteen years, my life has been dominated by school. Sure, I had summers off up to the end of high school. That helped, sort of. But after the unrelenting grind of Waterloo, I just feel one thing: tired, pure and simple. Not proud, not elated, not even truly happy: just tired, exhausted, spent. Maybe some day, I will look back on it more kindly, but right now, I'm worn too ragged to care. Was there more I could have done? I thought of going back for a Masters degree program, but really, you have to want to do something to be motivated enough to achieve it -- and I don't, at least not right now.

So, again, what do I do now? In what little time I have outside of my studies, I'm trying to look for jobs for which I might be qualified. But there's a part of me that doesn't even want to do that right now -- after all this, do you think I want to jump straight into a full-time job? Sometime this year, sure, but certainly not right away.

Is there anything else I could do? Maybe I'll travel, finally visit relatives in Germany or in PEI. Maybe I'll jump into more volunteering, with the CYA here, or my local church, or finally joining the Knights of Columbus (like my dad) or whatever. I still haven't really settled on anything.

I just feel ... directionless, maybe, like a log that's been jostled and bounced around in the rapids of a raging river for ages and that finally gets dumped into a lake where the current slows to nothing. There's all this space and nothing pushing me around anymore. How do I deal with it? Where do I go? What do I do? The void that yawns before me is both welcome and horrifying.

I'm sure I'll find something, but for now, I can only push on with what I have.