The World of Stuff .com

Of careers and colleges

Now that it’s getting late in my junior year of high school, the questions seem to be more and more frequent: “What do you want to do?” “Where are you going to college?” And I have to find out soon. But what am I going to do? I don’t know where I want to go to college, and I can’t really care about that until I know what I want to spend the rest of my life doing. After all, different colleges are better in certain areas, I’ve been told. You wouldn’t go to X University to study Y, and things of that nature.

Unfortunately, I’m going to have to make a decision about college (relatively) fast, and that means I’m going to have to make a career choice even faster. When you’re under such pressure, you really shouldn’t be making decisions like how you’re going to fritter away eight hours five days a week for forty to fifty years. Your career and the college you go to in order to make it a reality determine just about everything you do for the rest of your life. How much money you make, where you work and live, and even whom you marry can be influenced by the experiences (and pieces of paper) you obtain in higher education.

This is where I’m stuck. How do I want to seal my fate? I’m having a tough time with it all. I hear about interesting adults who are doing whatever they’re doing today because they were interested in it when they were teenagers or kids or toddlers. That kind of thing makes me sad because I don’t really have much of my own interests to draw from when making a career choice. I like playing the guitar. Bzzt, sorry. I… sit around on the computer? And write things? Yes, that’s true. I also enjoy computer programming. Well, I like my programming class, anyway.

But here’s what’s wrong with those choices. Writing is a fiendishly difficult business, one in which no one ever makes much money. I’ve tried writing fiction. In the past few months I’ve tried to write two novels and an anthology. I get a lot more practice with nonfiction, like this piece you’re reading now. But how am I to make a living writing about wondering how I’m to make a living? Just because I blog doesn’t mean I’d be able to write a newspaper column or anything (although that might be cool). And there’s little chance I’d be able to get paid or earn my own income like some of the big-time blogger sell-outs. You know who you are!

And then there’s computer programming. Some might say to me, “BUT JORDAN YOU LOVE COMPUTER PROGRAMMING WHY DONT YOU DO THAT AS A FULL TIME CAREER YOU ARE SO GOOD AT IT LOOK AT THIS HANGMAN GAME YOU MADE,” but then I’d cut them off and remind them exactly how long it took to make that game (though I am proud of it). The truth is, I’ve gotten into programming much too late to achieve greatness. If I were to have any chance of rising above the rank of the lowly office peon, I’d have needed to begin my foray into programming at the age of, say, 11, by teaching myself, say, C. I don’t know C. I’m pretty good with Visual Basic .NET, which is useless, and I can barely scrape by in PHP, which is like C but not.

I just mentioned that achieving greatness was a priority for me. By this, I mean emerging in some way as an accomplished leader figure like those who live in the history books. I don’t want to be trapped in some job I hate making some inadequate amount of money. It’s true that I want to do what I love, but I also want to achieve success, and I don’t think that’s so much to ask. I want to be the best at whatever I decide to do, maybe even if it doesn’t pay a lot of money (maybe). I want to be a success in my career and in life. But before I can, I have to decide what that career will be and whether I will be able to excel in it. If I don’t make it that far within the next few months, then all this pressure leads me to believe that I can only hope for a life filled with disappointment and obscurity.

Zillow.com bills itself as “Your Edge in Real Estate,” and it is just that. For free, and without registering, you can find the value of virtually any home. I found out that my house is worth over $470,000. The site also has charts and graphs of each house’s value over time, and disturbingly accurate facts like the date it was last sold, the year it was built, its area, and how many bedrooms and bathrooms it has.

The Ahhhhhh Page (warning: large) is a page that attempts to track the frequency of variations of the word “ahhhhhh,” such as “ah,” “aaaah,” and “aaaahhhhhhhhh.” The number of Google’s search results for each variation is displayed in a large table (more like a grid) that allows you to find the frequency of a combination of a’s and h’s rather easily… if you wanted to know.