The Attack of the Idea People

Occasionally, I get ideas.

However, a lot of the time, they get tossed in a made-up file drawer or scribbled on a piece of paper way too small to get the point across. I can't count how many times I have started a sentence with a "wouldn't it be awesome if I..." and finished it with something that can't survive once exposed to the Earth's atmosphere. Just last week, I shouted a similar question into an empty room. Logan answered back from the kitchen, his voice muffled by the distance between us: "we're idea people," he said. At first, I took this to be a good thing, a compliment, proof that my brain works or is at least allowing me to voice real thoughts in my mind in real time. Now, I'm not so sure...Wouldn't it be awesome if I could just get paid to travel and write about whatever I wanted? We're getting the band back together! Is it too late to become an astronaut? 

I feel like a cartoon character with spinning stars around my head. I've been hit by the reality of the future, the end of my Peace Corps service, and the beginning of "the next step." It has caused an explosion of possibilities, ideas, and dreams and choosing one seems unfair.

In college, I had a professor tell me that I was like a goose, flying around in the clouds. That's me, pictured on the left. As goosey as I am, I think I've at least been flying towards the same goal, maybe just not so straight and steady. I did almost finish 27 months as a Peace Corps Volunteer and I wanted to join since I was a kid. It's funny how you get to the places you get to (and hey, maybe I wouldn't have gotten here if my spirit animal had been a more direct non-flying one).

Getting ready for the next chapter is not easy and it seems to get harder and harder (stranger and stranger?) the closer I get to December. I go back and forth between knowing and not knowing, feeling confident and forgetting what confidence means, being cocky and shooting myself in the foot like an idiot. It's all OK, though. я знаю. Всё будет хорошо, как всегда! I really do believe this.

The original title for this post was "The Curse of the Idea People," but I changed it. It's not a curse to have ideas, even if they're silly, even if they involve trying to go to Mars (this is real, by the way). It's a curse not to do anything with them, even if you realize that they're actually not what you really want. If you are like me and you're flapping around in the sky while others are soaring on steady wings and making decisions like BAM and getting things done like POW, it's time to launch an attack--on your motivation and on your flying skills. I wish you luck and the power of focus. I say, you can fly as high as you want, as long as you get to where you want to be. Like the quote in the Peace Corps lounge says: "It's not the journey, but the destination."