el futuro

I'm twenty five years old.
A year and a half out of college.
Almost three years into love.
Too young to settle-down and tired of floating in the post-grad stagnation stew.
Eager to have, at least, a plan. Eager to move out of this college town.

Grad school: The most socially acceptable escape from having to figure it out. But that's just the cynic within me, there is ambition underneath this idea. There's also the fear of not being taken seriously without a PhD.
I am a woman, a mujer, in fact. I want to get a degree to prove that a child of immigrant parents can manage to hang with the brightest and whitest, but mostly to be held up on my friends and family's shoulders while they chant, "YOU DID IT!"
For a kid with chronic guilt from the sacrifices made to lay my path, few images are more powerful than that of a proud family. I want to give them what they themselves could not have dreamed of. I want to be the glass ceiling shattered, the success story, the one they'll brag about to friends and neighbors.

Ranking of the top 20 universities of 2012

How about that for wrong reasons to make a decision?

Are they wrong? I know I could do it. And I suspect that I will feel a lingering emptiness without the achievement. If anything it is a box I must check in my bucket list.

I'm not even looking to apply at UF, or other nonsense Florida universities with bleeding public funds and a grim future, either. I'm going to Harvard, baby. I'd love to frame that rejection letter.
I'm also applying to UC Berkeley and all its beautiful California sisters along the way.
Duke? Absolutely. Columbia? Hell yes. I've always wanted to live in New York.Go big or go home.

I'm tired of hypotheticals. I'm ready to go. Not getting any younger here, and by this point I'd be applying to Fall 2014 (Deadlines at the good ones close in the first week of December of the year prior to admission.)

BUT.

Decisions in this home are made for two.
The boy is here to stay. We're taking the next step, or fumble, together.
This school business is also the business of where on earth I might be choosing to birth/raise my first child even. [REAL LIFE]
It's also about the future of my partner. And that future is in labor organizing I think. IT IS RIGHT?). This is where things get tricky.

We're at home in Florida, at least politically.

We know the ins and outs of the horrible JebBush/RickScott brand of politics that squeezes every bit of public money onto callous private hands. We know labor in this state, union movements, weaknesses and strengths. And this community. They are our extended family, and they are here.

Part of me wants to run far away and slam the door shut behind me.
Part of me could not imagine living halfway across the country. (that pesky 4 year old nephew I want to watch grow up lives in Florida.)

It is perhaps too much for a perfectionist to handle.
You cannot draw out a map or make a checklist for your next 5-10 years.
But.I.want.to.


Real life.