(no subject)
Jun. 29th, 2007 08:28 pmWe come upon that time in our lives when we can no longer put off choosing a path. Two million roads diverge in a wood, and we can dither at the crossroads no longer - universities and career choices are looming perilously close ahead. Sometimes I wish I had a clear choice, some cause that I've believed in forever and which has obvious goals to accomplish.
Instead I want to do absolutely everything just because there are so many things I look at and can see myself doing them. Which greatly increases the chances of my being unsatisfied with anything I actually do. So far I've tried to think of ways to do as much as possible at the same time, which explains my reluctance to audition for acting schools above and beyond simple interview terror - almost to a fault they involve three or four years of intensive acting, leaving no room for anything else I want to do. If I was an amazing actor, maybe that would be enough, but acting is something I love rather than something I'm gifted at, so I baulk at committing to it exclusively.
Of course my parents want me to do something that will at some point involve a salary. Psychology looked promising for a while, until I realised that for much the same reason as I don't want to be a teacher, I would not really enjoy practicing psychology. I'd end up as a research psychologist, which doesn't pay jack shit. Now marketing is looking good as the kind of thing one can point to when people look at your creative endeavors and remind you not to quit your day job.
And then there are times when someone reminds me that I want to change the world, and it all flies in the air again. I just had a heated discussion with Alex, a friend from Drama Camp who wants to overthrow the global capitalist wossname. My end of the discussion was mostly picking apart his ideas and questioning his plans... all for his own good, of course. He's never going to have a successful revolution if he doesn't think things through. But it reminded me of how much I enjoy political ideas and hypothetical revolutions.
The thing is that it's been writing that I've always wanted to do. I recently read Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed, and now I realise that you know - I could do that. Not everyone changes the world by protesting APEC meetings - and it's so interesting, political fiction. You don't have to advocate anything, you can just explore a realistic idea of what people would really do in those situations. It lends itself perfectly to science fiction, to boot. Science fiction is not about technology or space expansion - it is essentially about how people deal with that new world. Let the scientists and the revolutionaries make radical changes to society, SF writers will have almost certainly listed every possible way humanity could respond to the new development. I recently heard an odd comment (odd to me, anyway): Zoe said she didn't find fictional politics interesting at all. But for me - real life can only ever go one way at a time. It's great to learn from history, but you also need to think about unhistory - the things that never happened, and what might have come of them.
Anyway, enough rambling - upshot of all that is, I now think I know what I would want to study if I end up doing an arts degree - things that would help me understand how people work. So yes, psychology, but also political science and game theory, and perhaps more history although god knows I'm sick of it by now at school. And on the other hand, Queensland University of Technology has an actual Creative Writing Production course under Bachelor of Fine Arts. And that would be an awesome thing to do.
Tally ho, kids, the future awaits!
Instead I want to do absolutely everything just because there are so many things I look at and can see myself doing them. Which greatly increases the chances of my being unsatisfied with anything I actually do. So far I've tried to think of ways to do as much as possible at the same time, which explains my reluctance to audition for acting schools above and beyond simple interview terror - almost to a fault they involve three or four years of intensive acting, leaving no room for anything else I want to do. If I was an amazing actor, maybe that would be enough, but acting is something I love rather than something I'm gifted at, so I baulk at committing to it exclusively.
Of course my parents want me to do something that will at some point involve a salary. Psychology looked promising for a while, until I realised that for much the same reason as I don't want to be a teacher, I would not really enjoy practicing psychology. I'd end up as a research psychologist, which doesn't pay jack shit. Now marketing is looking good as the kind of thing one can point to when people look at your creative endeavors and remind you not to quit your day job.
And then there are times when someone reminds me that I want to change the world, and it all flies in the air again. I just had a heated discussion with Alex, a friend from Drama Camp who wants to overthrow the global capitalist wossname. My end of the discussion was mostly picking apart his ideas and questioning his plans... all for his own good, of course. He's never going to have a successful revolution if he doesn't think things through. But it reminded me of how much I enjoy political ideas and hypothetical revolutions.
The thing is that it's been writing that I've always wanted to do. I recently read Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed, and now I realise that you know - I could do that. Not everyone changes the world by protesting APEC meetings - and it's so interesting, political fiction. You don't have to advocate anything, you can just explore a realistic idea of what people would really do in those situations. It lends itself perfectly to science fiction, to boot. Science fiction is not about technology or space expansion - it is essentially about how people deal with that new world. Let the scientists and the revolutionaries make radical changes to society, SF writers will have almost certainly listed every possible way humanity could respond to the new development. I recently heard an odd comment (odd to me, anyway): Zoe said she didn't find fictional politics interesting at all. But for me - real life can only ever go one way at a time. It's great to learn from history, but you also need to think about unhistory - the things that never happened, and what might have come of them.
Anyway, enough rambling - upshot of all that is, I now think I know what I would want to study if I end up doing an arts degree - things that would help me understand how people work. So yes, psychology, but also political science and game theory, and perhaps more history although god knows I'm sick of it by now at school. And on the other hand, Queensland University of Technology has an actual Creative Writing Production course under Bachelor of Fine Arts. And that would be an awesome thing to do.
Tally ho, kids, the future awaits!
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