2.93 is my current GPA going into the senior year of college at DePauw. About 99% of graduate programs require at least a 3.0 to be considered for acceptance. Two semesters left: will I make it? If I have done as well as I did last semester, I will be able to squeak out of DePauw with about a 3.01 . Blah, the shitty thing with this is that I’ve been trying so hard to get decent grades, and yet I’m still stumbling at an under-3 average. I really want to go to grad school, and it will be hard to go if I can’t even get this minimum GPA requirement at school. Right now, it looks like I will get my M.A. at a school that is not well known for their programs, just so I can get decent grades there and be able to get my Ph. D. from a more recognized institution. I just don’t feel that I can get anywhere in society without having at least an M.A. – I don’t care what anti-schooling people say, I just don’t have enough faith in my abilities to just go out and try my hand at whatever. I don’t want to work at McDonalds all my life.

This last year at DePauw was historic in the sense that so many new things happened. For the first time, my grades actually went up from the Fall to Spring semester, and while I was miserable, pining away for a lover the whole time, I finally felt like I was achieving near what I am capable. I ended the semester with a 3.27, which was the highest I’ve ever gotten, and it really frightens me to think that I need to pull near that both of the next two semesters to even have the slightest window of graduate school opportunity. Just the possibility that this could be the end of the line for me as far as schooling goes is something that sends shivers up my spine. I just want to make my parents happy. I know, though, that I could be bumming change off of people and still make my parents happy, so that may just be a bullshit reason for my drive for a doctorate.

So why do I feel this need to go as far as I can with this schooling? Well, right now it looks like I will be doing graduate work in Political Science, which is slightly different from my original plan of getting my doctorate in Classical Languages. Now, Political Scientists on the average are more highly-sought and have more possible career choices than cunning linguists like myself, and I have a professor that had really stoked the fires of political science in me all this year. Professor Sahu, who taught two classes I was in (International Terrorism and Comparative Politics), really got me thinking about doing some research in an Asiatic country, perhaps India, Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan, or China. More than that, though, he was incredibly informative without being arrogant or dense – I felt during each class, he was just talking to the class body as if we were all just sitting around a table, playing cards. Aside from that, the professor continually gave hints (that were by and large ignored) on how to get complete support for future studies in the comparative politics arena.

But why, after seven years of taking Latin, did I finally start to decide that I don’t want to focus in that field for the duration of my life? Well, the bad thing about Latin is that we don’t have too tremendously much extant that people focus on, with the brunt of High School and College Latin using late-Republic and early Empire writers. Now, what gets really annoying with these authors is that a large amount of them, mainly poets, use the same analogies, sentence structures, and vocabularies. After three or four full semesters of translating these same structures, I just frankly got bored to tears every time I would see a Horace or Catullus poem. I need something different, I want to read the records from the late Empire (300-400 CE), I want to read Ennius or just anything that wasn’t written in the first century BCE or CE. I’m done with taking Latin at DePauw; my senior year, I am taking two semesters of Greek in the off-chance I get interested in classical languages again and bolster my chances for acceptance in one of the Classical Languages graduate programs.

I’m frightened of the future. I have no clue what I will be doing in the next few years, and that is even more scary than when I was picking out colleges back at the end of my high school career. I’ve grown used to the small-town antics of DePauw, and while I am ready to be out of there more than probably anyone else, I really don’t want to be stuck in a huge city on the east or west coast, without knowing anyone or anything in the city. I want to be the big fish in the small sea, but I also want to be in a huge city like Berkeley or Boston. Every time some path closes to me, whether it be when I didn’t get into any of my top six choices in undergrad colleges, it is one nail in my coffin. My death will be the second I am locked into doing any one thing. I need different paths to travel down, or I will become bored, depressed, and probably will fall into some rather nasty habits. I don’t fall into these habits deeply because I am not backed into a corner – right now I have a myriad of things to be doing, whether it is work on my compilation, promote a local show, do reviews, or write for my magazine. To be James is to be a clusterfuck of half-realized and in-progress dreams, branching out like a tree, to touch as many people positively in my life before I die.