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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
I see a lot of people bashing a young man who didn't even write the letter for going on vacation and deciding to change his mind about med school and go to China to teach english.
How immature, how pretensious, how horrible he went to Burning Man and got the kooky idea to see a little bit more of planet earth before buckling down for 8 more years of intense study and rigorous testing to land a demanding career!
Then he came back and decided okay, I think I'll go to med school all before he's 25 and he doesn't have any children or a wife! How immature of him, how reckless!
I have seen numerous other columns where some young person is not sure about settling down with a relationship or grad school or a career and the advice is travel, see the world, you're young, there is plenty of time for school and marriage and kids!
Wow what a jerk for not just going on to med school, becoming a doctor and finding a wife and maybe having some kids and going to China or wherever on vacation when his practice or hospital schedule allows it. I bet experiencing another culture in two or three weeks is just like living there and interacting with the locals for a year. Some of you sound just like the LW who was pissed he changed his mind too. Sure he did some other jerky things to her, but dammit, he wasn't married he didn't cheat and he followed through on a plan that helped him in some personal way.
Isn't that what the young years are for, to explore life and see and do things that you might not be able to after you lock yourself into a career and partnerships and maybe kids?
Or is the problem just that this hippy dippy arty farty festival is where he changed his mind about how soon he'd enter the race for an upper class important career?
I'm just wondering why there is so much grad student bashing going on here....
I was especially surprised by the fact that so many people seem to tie grad school to trust funds and being out of touch with small towns. I grew up in a small town in Montana and I now go to grad school in a town with a larger population than the entire state of Montana. Many of my childhood friends are in other graduate programs all across the country (ranging from English to law to various fields of science). Being a graduate student and being a kind hearted, uncomplicated, and down to earth person are not mutually exclusive. My eventual PhD doesn't make me any different from the people I grew up with who work the family ranch or wait tables at a restaurant in my hometown.
Cut the LW some slack people. In the end, we all just want to be happy.
my sympathies lie most with the miserable philosophy student turned "handyman" (and what's wrong with that?). Graduate students are miserable and doubting for a reason--it's a fairly miserable profession.
To wit:
"However, after a trip to Burning Man, he rejected his previous goals as meaningless and bourgeois, and instead decided that a nomadic life of teaching English in the Chinese countryside was truly what he wanted to do. After several months of his becoming less interested in normal everyday life in favor of the novel, exotic zaniness of the Burning Man lifestyle, and by extension less interested in normal, everyday me, I could tolerate no more of his neglect, veiled put-downs and so on and broke things off with him."
It's not going off to China. It's not going off to China because his eyes were opened at Burning Man.
It's that he was a SMUG ASSHOLE about his "awakening." It wasn't just that he regarded his own goals as "meaningless and bourgeois," he thought that everyone else's were, too--and didn't exactly keep those thoughts to himself.
There are people who go to Burning Man because they like to see big, cool pieces of art that you won't see anywhere else. They come back and have great photos and interesting stories, but don't tell all their friends that they are "part of the problem because they're not part of the solution."
This guy isn't one of them.
You're young, and it appears to me that neither of these young men are really long-term, settle down, have a couple kids kind of guys. One is brilliant but remote and emotionally unavailable, and the other is financially unstable--a good guy, but you gotta pay the bills. Brilliant doesn't count for much, and Con-Ed doesn't care if you're nice.
Have you considered that neither of these men is the person you should hitch your star to?
The fact is, you could be happy with hundreds of men in your zip code. You don't need a soul mate. You need a man whose company pleases you, who thinks about your needs as much as you think about his, who is flexible and responsible, and who wishes good things for you--as you do him.
I'd pitch both these guys off the end of the dock and keep fishing. You'll find the right one eventually.
You might have picked that up already, from previous posts. But if not, I'm just letting you know. For future reference.
It would be such a shame to waste all this intelligence.
In the second paragraph the LW states that she will be leaving her home state for graduate school. Are the two men going with her or might one go with her? I mean if she is moving away from the whole mess pretty soon, doesn't that partially solve the problem of choosing?
As to the LW's last question about how three well-meaning people are so unhappy, I would hazard a guess it was because they were bored. I'm not saying that sarcastically. If sex is the number one motivator for making a mess of your life, boredom has to be a close second.
Some posters have speculated that the people in this letter are just spoiled trust fund, upper middle class kids who create their own little world of drama because they've never had to really work, etc., etc. Uh, no. I will not defend the character of the rich or upper middle class because when it gets right down to it, they DO have a tendency to make people want to smack them sometimes.
But I will state unequivically that scholarship kids in fancy colleges, kids who work their way through college, kids in community college and kids who move into an apartment right out of high school and get a job are as perfectly capable of making a twisted, tiring, eye-rolling mess of their personal lives as any trust fund grad student. I know this, because I've known or raised kids in all those categories. Funny, it almost makes me proud to proclaim that poorer kids can f**k up their lives just as exquisitely as trust fund kids.
Also, a request from the advertising director at Salon, or whoever decides what ads go where on the page. What's with "1 Rule to A Flat Stomach" ad. It's really distracting and not in a good way. I had to tape a piece of paper on my screen just so I could read some of the articles here. But if I never have a bigger problem for at least a couple of days, I would be thankful.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
