the “c” word

That’s right, ladies and gentlemen. College.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about whether or not I want to go. Obviously my parents want me to. The hard part is trying to factor in whether or not that really matters to me. You see, I want to be a dancer, there’s no mistake about that. The question is, how do I get there? I don’t want to be a ballerina. Contemporary and commercial dance are where my heart’s at. I don’t necessarily need to go to college to be able to do those, I just think my parents believe that all successful roads in life start with university.

The problem, part two: I don’t want to waste the first four years of my adulthood, when I could be joining a company/agency or getting better training and seeing the world (London, specifically), trapped taking jazz and working towards a useless bachelor’s degree. I wanna do exciting things and meet exciting people. I want to dance.

Some of my friends’ life goals look like this: graduate high school, go to college and get a meaningless degree, and maybe work a little bit before marrying a dude and raising his family. I’d rather not. I have ambitions. Every day college starts to seem less like an achievement to aspire towards and more like a roadblock on the path to what I really want to do. I’m in the eleventh grade and the reason for everything I do nowadays has been reduced to “It’ll look good on your transcript.”

I overheard a conversation between a friend and his mother when they were the car yesterday. He told her that he didn’t want to go to uni because voice acting was the career he was after, which made college somewhat unnecessary. His mother said to him, “Will you feel the same way when you can’t feed your own family?” and that swiftly ended the conversation. Tense silence in the car.

Our parents just want the best for us. But I’m not ready to dedicate more anxiety, time, and money thinking about something that will determine the course of my adulthood. It’s too big for sixteen. I just want to dance honestly.

— Bethany.

we like archaic kinds of fun

Hello, everyone, it’s Bethany. Been a while, hasn’t it?

Me and the girls haven’t been on the blog too much lately, I know. Sorry about that. I just wanted to get on here and give some updates on what we’ve been doing this winter. It’s been quite eventful for us, and I’m really excited to see how the rest of 2014 plays out.

Maddie started college this term. Hopefully she’ll be on here within the next couple of weeks to talk about that. She’s decided she wants to study to become an engineer, which I think is very fitting for her. She has started going to TNCC to study all her necessary intro college classes and, this is my opinion, I think she’s enjoying it. For the longest time she had no idea what, exactly she wanted to do with her life, so I’m glad that she’s found something to study.

Krysta is working as per usual. She’s the only one out of the three of us who has a steady job, go figure. We see each other more now that the new year has started; which is great considering we’re both so busy.

As for me? Dancing, dancing, dancing. My time is split somewhat equally between ballet, theatre, schoolwork, and writing. My music is becoming more important to me now as well. All my energy is geared towards finishing high school and muting the stress with my outlets. To be honest I think chaos is the nicest way to occupy oneself.

So that’s what we’ve been up to lately, I hope you’ve all had amazing winter breaks.

— Bethany.