Envy With Footnotes

Is this a crisis?

What I don't like about social media is the fact that I get up-to-the-minute updates on how my peers are so much better people than me in so many ways. Sure, I could just opt not to look at status updates in Facebook, or block people, or "unfriend"* them altogether, but doing so would lead to another crisis better discussed elsewhere.


Just this morning I opened my Facebook account and the first entry in the news feed was an announcement made by one of my former classmates at the university: She had been accepted by a university in New York. I had known for some time that she'd been applying for admission to many universities in the U.S., and didn't exactly think it was impossible; but reading the uppercase announcement this morning drove me into a frenzy of envy and self-doubt.

I congratulated her, of course. Even during our time in college it was obvious that she had not just the desire and the skills, but also the drive, to get onto the top rungs of the academic ladder.

She was by no means a fluke among the students of our college course. The girl who graduate summa cum laude of our year managed to study in Europe for some time, and one of my bestfriends, Raz, had already managed to get a scholarship to study in Japan about a year ago, and would be going back there this summer on the merits of a paper she'd submitted. These two are instructors in UP, while my other bestfriend, Trish, is also a teacher, who handles children (and their power-tripping parents) with grace and patience.

And what am I doing? I'm a minor employee, in charge of chasing down stray punctuation, marking up misspellings, checking paragraph spacing, rendering pages, and making sure that reference links are working when the web page to my particular jurisdiction** is accessed. Sure, the pay's decent enough, but hardly soul-satisfying.

Almost five years have passed since we got our degrees, and what have I to show for it?

When I was a kid I honestly believed I could be anything I wanted to be, the struggle nowadays, though, is to be something.


* I refuse to accept that it is a legitimate word, and its usage in this blog will always and forevermore be in quotation marks.

** I edit law books for a living.