I am what I am what I am

But what did I want to be in the past? I definitely had some ideas. I remember wanting to be in a relationship by freshman year, but that's not the case. I'm not particularly disappointed about that one as it just hasn't worked out.

Other things: I really loved Nancy Drew at some point, and wanted to be just like her when I grew up. I wanted to solve crimes and be a supergenius and everything. And that didn't work out. Also I've become disillusioned with Nancy when I learned her author was more than one person.

Which brings me here. I've always loved mysteries. Always. Give me a good, plausible mystery and I'm set for a while. My dream career was to be a mystery author, and I always aspired to do that at a young age, leading to predictably unfinished stories about kids trying to find lost gerbils, with themes always heavily borrowed (looking back on one in particular it was almost like plagiarism) from the books I was reading at the time.

My perceptions of the future have changed drastically. I still think it would be cool to be an author, but given my track record of unfinished stories I doubt that's ever going to happen. I've found the awakening of a passion for computer science, and a wide range of interesting careers that I would love to be a part of. My dream now is a position at Google, perhaps a software engineer or something of the sort.

But my present self... that's complicated. To quote Buckminster Fuller: "...I don't know what I am. I know that I am not a category."

I really don't know what I am. Adjectives are insufficient to describe this tired, irritable, odd girl. I'm not a category, I'm a sum of experiences and thoughts and beliefs.

However, I've begun to find myself through these most recent of experiences. I'm an emerging citizen of the world, able to see that these United States are not the best place ever, but that they are indeed a pretty damn good place to live. I've begun to find that the center of the universe is not me. I keep becoming more complex, and I am proud of that.

I think my younger self would disapprove of aspects of me, like my swearing and my atheism and procrastination and lazyness and general un-good-ness, but in other ways, we'd find we still have so much in common. We both love reading and Pokemon and civility and things like that. We both get frustrated with things and overemotional with others.

To add another Fuller quote: "I seem to be a verb."

~Niki
(Also I don't seem to be any better at staying on topic than my younger self)