GAH

RESEARCH PAPER

BUDGET PROJECT

MONEY

HOME

MONEY

WORK

MONEY

SCHOOL

MONEY

PAIN

...GAH.

To quote the Almighty Lucy of Peanuts, "Stop the world, I wanna get off!"

My head is spinning from all the recent insanity around me. David and I think we have almost figured the money issues out, but everything else boils down to time and effort. Time I don't have and effort that was long ago exhausted. Right now ED is making peanut butter cookies with green icing, and that sounds very nice right now. I'm trying to focus on the nice little things I've been to frantically panicking to notice lately. Like cookies, Cookie (ED's puppy), my writing, my aspirations to attend SCAD, and all the built-up excitement over getting married this summer.

Which reminds me.

Who cares what I do with my life besides me, really?
A hundred years ago...heck, I could even say fifty, forty...it was considered offensive and fool hearty idea for a woman to aspire to do anything but be a housewife and mother. Now, every woman is expected to go to college and come out on top of some successful industry that has her making $100,000 per year and wearing a power suit to work every day. For a modern woman to desire nothing more than a proper marriage and a family is so unacceptable to so many people...a woman who chooses to take on the full-time jobs of being a faithful, dutiful wife and a loving mother is not respected as the same class of human being as a woman that delays or rejects these ideas in exchange for loads of debt from student loans and a decent job that they will likely end up hating anyway.

I'm all for women branching out and becoming anything they want to be- but if I am truly happy, satisfied, and productive as nothing more than a writer, a wife, and a woman, who has the right to dictate that I am a less responsible, less intelligent, less experienced, or "spoiled" woman?

My ideal future is to get married, get stationed somewhere reasonable, and attend the Savannah College of Art and Design while David is deployed, as he is very likely to be within one or two years of joining the USMC. But let's use our common sense, children; that plan is very naive.
More than likely I will not have much of a choice in where David is stationed, or about when I will be able to attend college on an actual campus. Though I realize that online college is a great option that I will probably take advantage of, I feel in my very core that my duty is to my husband first, because he will be and always has taken wonderful care of me at his own expense, and truly enjoys seeing me happy.
College is not necessary for financial success. The opposite belief is, to be brutally honest, an incredibly common misconception. And, believe it or not, folks, money isn't everything. If I want to make money, I'll write and work my tail off, and my writing will be as likely to become popular as the work of someone with a degree. In fact, since it's fiction, it could end out even more successful.
Another point- This is the United States of America. I have here more freedom than any other woman on earth could hope for. I can attend college whenever I want. At nineteen, at twenty-five...at thirty or forty.

I can make of my life whatever I want to make of it.

And that is a wonderful, enlightening, nerve-wracking thought.

The world is ours for the taking. Our generation, for its peak of twenty years or so, will rule this earth in whichever way we choose to. We are the future. We are the champions.

The heart isn't always a trustworthy compass, but love is- love is not an emotion or an obligation or a natural instinct...all those things come from love. Love is simply the choice to put another human being before one's self in every way possible because it brings you sheer joy. Love is letting another know, every day, through everything you do, that you see the truest form of beauty in them, shimmering through all their faults, and you hold them higher than yourself because without them, your world would be a much uglier place.

Love is a choice, and everything we tend to think it is is a byproduct of that shimmer of divinity that we so long to embrace.

If I have to live in a two-bedroom apartment and work every day of my life, if I have to scrounge, fight, push or pull, I will live my life with love for everything God has blessed me with, starting with the love of my love. College is still a huge priority, but c'mon people...without differences, humanity would be even more miserable than it already is.

"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams,
We are the movers and shakers,
For our world forever, it seems."

Shalom,
~W.V.~