Friday, December 2, 2011

Things To Do Before I am 30

This is how I look to a 3-year old.
My senior year of high school I took a class entitled "Agriculture Business." At the time I wanted to go to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and get a Agribusiness Degree and go work for some big time monster Ag corporation like Monsanto, gags. In any case the class covered my Economics graduation requirement. I can't remember most of my assignments there except for a competition I went to (and WON!) about agricultural cooperatives but one silly assignment stuck in my brain: we were required to make a poster illustrating what we wanted to accomplish by the time we were 30. I wish I had kept that but alas, I am not a pack-rat. I can remember most of what was on it, though, and with the big 3-0 only year-and-a-half away lets review:
  • Graduate High School, check
  • Graduate College with a Bachelors Degree, check
  • Get a high paying power job
  • Find a Hottie and get him to marry me, double check!
  • Own my own home, yup
  • Travel to Foreign lands
  • Speak a Foreign language
I can't remember having anything on there about having kids but I was pretty sure that I never wanted to have them when I was 17 and the second eldest of 5 children. So looking at that list one might say that it is pretty shallow. Yup. Many of the things also didn't hold up to reality: I only held one job out of college and it was neither high paying or powerful (I will forever call it my "soul sucking" job), I haven't traveled and I stopped learning French after 4 years because I married a German speaker. But hey, I still have a year and a half so let's see what I can accomplish!

In June Andrew and I will be chaperoning a bunch of teenage German language students to, you guessed it, Germany. Aha! Travel!!! Ding ding ding! But I also need to speak German in order to go on the trip. I have around 7 months to get to about a German 3 level. I started learning at the end of October and finished German 1 with a 94% on my final the third week of November. I sped through that puppy but it was exhausting and now I am struggling with serious Deutsch burnout. I am allowing myself two months, until the end of January, to do German 2 and the deadline for German 3 is June 1. If I can get that all done I will have completed nearly all of my shallow high school goals! Woot!

It got me wondering though, how many of us remember what our dreams were when we were 17? I find mine pretty practical considering my age but also most definitely influenced by the TV shows and movies of my teen years. The things that I listed showed what my 17-year old self  believed the pathway to success to be: Education-->Awesome Job --> Money --> Travel, House, and a man to love me. While education is still important to me, having a high paying power job certainly is not. With time and experience I certainly still value certain things on that list but for different reasons. Like traveling for its own sake, rather than to say that I had traveled; Speaking a foreign language to broaden my horizons and work my brain rather than just to put it on a resume. And how about having kids? Being a good wife and mother have taken top priority on my life's list of "To Do's." I think my 17 year-old self would have scoffed at the notion of domestic happiness being my chief desire, and yet, ten years later, it is.

Life is wonderful. Life is harder than I ever thought it would be. Life is better than I ever imagined.

2 comments:

  1. I missed this post! Well, I haven't been reading hardly ANY blogs lately, I've been so busy.

    Anyway, that's funny about the high-paying power job. Somehow, I can see you wanting that as a teenager, lol. Me, I wanted to graduate from BYU early, at the age of 20, and then get married. I always wanted a family, in fact I wanted a HUGE family (the HUGE is no longer my desire). I can't really remember what else I wanted. Probably a big house. :)

    I ended up not getting any degree until I was 27, and it was an associates only. I didn't get married till 25. I did manage to have one child before 30, and buy a house, although it's not so big. But hey, I'm happy. :)

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  2. True, true, esp the last sentence. you'll love Germany. What an awesome experience!!

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