When most people hear the word “future” they usually think about flying cars, giant skyscrapers, and corporations taking over the world. But what a lot of people don’t think about is that the future is tomorrow, or a week from now. Where will you be in a week? A month? A year? It’s uncertain–I mean, you can have a pretty good guess as to where you’ll be, but in the end you never know. This uncertainty is one of the reasons I’ve been stressed out today.
Now, if you’ve read my “About” page, you know I’m only 14, and I’m in 8th grade. It may seem a bit silly for a 14 year old to be preoccupied with worrying about the future, but here’s what got me thinking: my spring break just ended, which means that the next big break from school is summer vacation. That’d be fine any other year of school, but then I got to thinking “oh man, I’m going to be a freshman in high school next year.” Then I got to thinking “well what about after high school? What then? And will my grades stay up in high school enough to make it in life?” The future does scare me, a bit, and I’d personally be much more content staying in 8th grade my entire life where things really don’t matter, and I can screw around knowing that in the end everything will be alright.
Yeah that’s all fine and dandy, but sadly we’re quickly speeding into the future at one second per second, and as those seconds pass by I get closer and closer to high school and college and the real world and the uncertainty of said real world.
And my teachers aren’t helping a whole lot with relaxing me. Today in health class, the bane of my existence, we learned about “club drugs”. Apparently, if you ever go to a high school party, you’ll most likely walk out of there with something in your body you didn’t want, i.e. some form of E or K or H or GCB or some other letter. (I realize this is a gratuitous exaggeration, but those are literally the words my teacher used.)
Then there are the teachers who don’t realize that you have other classes outside of theirs, so they decide to just pile on a crap-ton of homework and projects, all due in two weeks. Thanks to Italian, ho paura di fallire. Tutto. (Sorry to any native speakers, I probably just butchered your language.)
I probably shouldn’t be worried about this, but I am. And I think everyone my age is, deep down. You hear about all these things from your parents like taxes and mortgages and bankruptcy, and you begin to wonder just how long you can stretch out your childhood before being thrust into the unknown, all by yourself.
7 metres 