When you live life by coming up with thousands of possible branches on your personal decision tree, planning the possibilities, as it were, one inevitably wonders what might have happened had you taken that other option here or there.<\/p>\n
I was terribly unassertive in my high school and early college days. Towards the end of high school, I said once to my older sister that I was thinking of maybe taking my time about going to college. An extra year to do what I wasn’t quite certain. I think I was saying something about letting the financial aid offers roll in (Ha!). Liz was not much impressed by this plan, though I wasn’t convinced. And Mom talked to me within the following couple of days, assuring me of the urgency of not delaying on this one. How it would do anything but help me get financial aid, and how this was a crucial step in becoming a better, happier person. Of course, a year and a half later, I temporarily psuedo-dropped out. And when I got back in pushed myself through on sheer willpower over boredom. Trying to focus attention on academic topics of marginal interest to me, when personal issues seemed so much more relevant.<\/p>\n
And it occurred to me that college played a major role in shaping the new me. Zephyr and graffiti, and geeks. Steve, and Josh, and much later, Mark. What if I had stayed in ohio for an extra year, waited on college. Developed my own independent identity first. What then? How different would I be? <\/p>\n
And what if instead of going to the elitist private university, I’d gone to the populist, public university’s elitist honor’s college, and gotten a full ride out of the deal?<\/p>\n
Those are the two big whatifs that caught my attention this evening. Would have made a big difference, I’m pretty sure. The me-that-never-was. How can one have wistful nostalgia for that which never happened?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When you live life by coming up with thousands of possible branches on your personal decision tree, planning the possibilities, as it were, one inevitably wonders what might have happened had you taken that other option here or there. I was terribly unassertive in my high school and early college days. Towards the end of … Continue reading “A little game of “what if””<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1028","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1028","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1028"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1028\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1028"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1028"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}