the wheel breaks the butterfly

There are shelves of "life lenses" through which you can carefully squint and decide, quite rightly in the context of the lens, what to do with your life. I say "your" life, I mean my life.

But with shelves full of lenses, there are those that are violently justifiable as you look through them. There's a reason and a purpose and a clarity and a sensibility. But as soon you find two or more of these, the crispness which they refract light dulls to blurry over-photoshopped smudges of colours.

• The work hard lens, chiming with commitment and work ethic and earning your keep.
• The do what you love lens, glaring with engagement and purpose.
• The this world is merely a fleeting shadow lens, glinting with the idea that the details of what you do don't matter, it's how you do them.
• The guilty lens, reflecting my lethargy and contempt, and guilting unwilling change.
• The goal-driven lens, focusing on ambitions and accomplishments, and that job titles and salaries are a way to keep score.
• The hippy lens, which is dusty and in a box outside in the shade underneath some Douglas Adams.

I'm having a thunk about the work I'm chugging through this year, and whether I want to go back to school, or do something else. Or hustle and fuss through another year, and call it a year's experienced (and salary) earned.

Though I'm the better part of 25 years old, most of the trepidation in making a decision like this is the misunderstanding and confusion my parents will have. I don't know that they'll be able to rationally and objectively process what I'm doing and why. Well, no, I do know that they won't be able to.

I should have studied medicine. Parents are decidedly less tedious when you challenge their tedium with the fact that they are depriving you from saving lives.

Bully.