My name is Kate. I am 28 years old, single, and live at my parents’ house in rural Illinois. I have a close-knit circle of friends, who have taught me more, I am sure, than I have taught them. I like to consider myself thoughtful, reasonably intelligent, grounded by nature and am greatly appreciative of the absurd. A year and a half ago I graduated from a small, private Great Books school with a double major in the Humanities and the Social Sciences. I am currently unemployed. I have never before disliked the person I see myself becoming.
I have not always been unemployed, though I have always lived at home--aside from partial stints of time spent living in dorms, house-sitting for months out of the year, and twice while briefly living abroad for school. Though reasonably intelligent I have never been overly practical, especially in regard to my interests and hobbies. I tend to enjoy things that have no value to society in general; reading (especially poetry), letter writing (which I do infrequently and quite sporadically), stained glass (which I am inordinately proud of for the small number of pieces I have produced), assorted handicrafts and baking. I wrote my thesis on the history of English stained glass painting. To my knowledge, no one has read it.
It took me nine years to graduate from college. It wasn’t that I struggled through my courses as much as I enjoyed them too much to finish anywhere near on time. The first five years of my collegiate career I spent at a local community college, while I worked full-time for my father’s glass glazing business. My time at community college was invaluable, mostly due to the mentorship of my creative writing professor. She taught me both about beauty as well as absurdity, and that often the best way to deal with either is a well-timed cigarette.
I spent the next four years gleefully drowning in dusty philosophical works that few people these days deem relevant. I would highly recommend the experience. It reinforced something I had already begun to suspect, that beauty and absurdity have been present as long as human beings, which I find reassuring and just as equally exasperating. It also taught me that while reading and discussing Ideas (both Great and Not-So-Great ones) can be wonderful and enlightening, it can also lead to the mistaken belief that the world is a concept to dissect, rather than a place to live.
My little college (I believe there were twelve in my graduating class) has enough clout to send a small group of students to Oxford to study for a year. Somehow I managed to sneak my way in. I won’t say anything much about Oxford, the entirety of my time there was like a wonderful, cold, damp intellectual dream. I spent it in pursuit of sensible things, such as Russian literature, the history and philosophy of Western civilization, English stained glass painting and ales. And lagers. And ciders. Most of all, it reminded me of how wonderful the world can be.
Graduation brought with it the horrible realization that I had nothing planned. That is the downside of writing theses at philosophical schools when you’re not planning on going on to a graduate program. You get distracted by deadlines and the End. Haha. Oops. And it turns out that a double major in the Humanities and the Social Sciences doesn’t get you much in rural Illinois. Haha. Oops. And then the family glass shop took a fatal hit, and for the first time in my life I had neither purpose nor job. Not so funny, but a really big oops. So I jumped into some ventures with friends that were wonderful but not so lucrative, and ended up broke, still at home, and harboring an increasing amount of cynicism and defeatism.
So in the midst of an incredibly depressing, soul-killing job hunt, it suddenly came to me. Korea. Well, it’s not so much that it suddenly came to me as my aunt dropped some information that she had heard from a clerk at an Arizonian Birkenstock. Regardless. It became clearer and clearer with each endlessly non-productive day that I needed a renaissance. An Asian journey of personal discovery. Foregoing a knapsack and spiritual awakening for a paycheck and housing, of course. And so on the 20th of February, I will be embarking on my search for purpose and the meaning behind my existence on this earth in the science and technology mecca of South Korea, Daejeon. A city with 1.5 million people (a far cry from my small hometown of approximately 1,200), where I will be teaching English to small children (which I find slightly terrifying in and of itself), and endeavoring to discover what it is I am supposed to be doing. Haha. And hopefully no oops.
