I don't want to be graduated...

It's so weird to think that less than a month from now, most of my friends from Potsdam will be back up there... and I won't.  I plan on going up and visiting a few times - the drag show, the Pride parade if they do that again, my girlfriend's formal for her sorority - but as a student, I'm done there.  And that is so, so, so crazy.  Five years in college, and now I'm (nearly) done.

Nearly?  Yeah... I have to take a stupid world history class - a 100 level class - before I can get my diploma.  A freaking 100 level class is keeping me from officially graduating.  Thanks, Potsdam!  I'm taking it online this fall.  So even though I've already walked across the stage, I don't technically graduate until December of this year.  And I've REALLY got to start looking at grad school, but I don't even know what I want to get my master's in!  I've been saying I want to get my master's in special education, but that's solely because I've been told since I declared "education" as my major that having a degree in special education makes you more "marketable" as a teacher.  A friend of my grandfather's asked me if I would prefer working with students who are physically handicapped or mentally handicapped, and I said I don't know.  But what I didn't say is that fact that I don't know because I don't even know that that's what I want to do with my life!  I'm one class away from having a degree in education and I'm one certification exam away from having an initial teaching certification, but I'm not even sure if teaching is what I want to do.

Do you know what I want to do?  I want to go back to Nashville and live there.  I don't even care what kind of job I have - I'd even wait tables! - I just want to be in Nashville.  How can people just KNOW what they want to spend their lives doing?  I'm nearly 23 years old and (almost) have a college diploma, but I still don't know what I want to spend my life doing.  How are there people who know from the time they're kids what they want to do?  How can I commit to just one idea in life when there's so much to choose from?  I mean, I know I want to do something with kids.  But... what?  Teaching, I guess, because that's what I (pretty much) have a degree in, but god, public school is just so structured.  I didn't like public school when I was in school, so how am I to like it more if I were teaching there?  I LOVED my time with my fourth graders (I can't believe they'll start fifth grade in just over a month!!), but I absolutely hated being in that second grade class I was in for my first student teaching placement...

I feel like I'm supposed to know what I want to do with my life.  They expect kids at 17 to know what they want to do with the rest of their entire lives the second they graduate from high school.  I didn't know then, and I sure as hell don't know now.  I'm supposed to have a plan, but I don't.

I don't want to be graduated.  I want to go back to Potsdam.

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