12:10 AM

I'm exhausted. But, I just finished my application to the Peace Corps, and my application to 5 schools of Public Health. Here is the list (in no particular order):

1. University of Washington
2. Emory University
3. Boston University
4. University of Illinois at Chicago
5. University of Pennsylvania at Pittsburgh

It's all out on the table now! Just have to wait for my letter writers to finish their stuff, and get my transcript sent to the Peace Corps, and I'm good to go.

In other news, I am looking at a job driving cars for Google. Pays better than Starbucks, that's for sure, but I will basically be giving my social life away as a result. We will see. This seems to be the year of menial labor for me. Is my degree worth anything besides the 6 figures a year my parents paid for it?

But the great part of it all is I can't complain, because I had the opportunity to be in grad school right now, but decided to put it off to figure out what I really wanted to do. Well, I suppose I can check two things off my list.

Also, I started volunteering at a hospital in the ER. That should prove to be interesting. I'm still in the bureaucratic rigamarole stage of the whole thing, but once I'm on the other end, it should be an exciting position to be involved in.

You know, it's funny to see than only a month ago I was full of ideals about being able to improve people's lives without a college degree and now it seems that I am contemplating taking a butt-kicker of a job just because it pays better than Starbucks. I mean, it would be cool to drive around California taking pictures, but every day? 6pm-1am? Sometimes working weekends? Well, I'd be used to the whole working weekends thing from Starbucks, but still....

Anyways, I'll probably read this in the morning and berate myself for my pessimism. The fact is, I am in a transitional year. It is good to remind myself that grad school would have been a bad idea if I had started it in September. I have a found a good community at PBCC, or rather re-found a good community. I suppose it scares me that I could lose that by taking the Google job (it isn't even technically a Google job, Google contracts it out to a third party company). It also scares me how much the idea of making an extra 6 dollars per hour is motivating me to consider throwing away the community that I have. There is some reasoning in the back of my head that says you'll have more money for grad school, but I'm looking to get financial assistance for that anyways. There's also some more reasoning that says I'm just getting tired of Starbucks and looking for something new. That same reasoning says that I'll probably get tired of driving a car around taking pictures of the street just as quickly.

In any case, now is a good time to go to sleep. That's a decision that isn't too hard to make. ;-)