On the verge of emo

When I step back and take a look at my life, I can say fairly truthfully that my life is pretty good.

I served a mission in Oklahoma City for two years without managing to get killed by a tornado or angry Baptists. I am actually somewhat financially independent and have a steady, stable job that generates enough income for me to pay rent and eat and buy nice things from time to time. I have an incredible fiance and am getting married this spring in April, which many guys at the BYU tell me they envy (mostly the fact that I'm getting married and not so much lusting after my fiance, though there is some of that from time to time). Despite some rather serious (in an Asian's eyes) blunders in school, I am managing to progress slowly and painfully through the halls of academia.

Things are good. Steady job, good fiance, marriage on the horizon.

But I can't still help feeling like a catastrophic failure in life, all because of school. I have managed to do what many people don't do - chosen a wife before I've chosen my major. I'm still wandering through school, not even caring if I do well or not. I wish I could change that fact in me, but I can't. It's hard for me to care sometimes about how well I do in school. It's never held much meaning to me.

So why do I feel so terrible about it? Probably because to me, education is still a major deal, instilled as a doctrine since I was a wee Korean American. While my parents never threatened to disown me if I got a C, they still weren't happy when I got, horror of horrors, an A- in math.

I wish I could care, and I wish I want to try harder and do better, and at the beginning of a semester I do but eventually I fall into the same mire of apathy that I've been trying to shrug off for years. I don't think I'm lazy; I enjoy trying to be productive at my job and while the mission was the hardest years of my life, they were also the most fulfilling and enjoyable up to this point. I devote a lot of time and energy in becoming the best person I can for my wife to be, and I always make more goals than I can probably realistically handle, but continue to do work on them at a slow and steady pace.

I wish I could pinpoint it. Bitterness? Resentment at school? A fear of failing and thus a fear of even trying? A desperate attempt to cut my ties from my parents and try to do my own thing to prove myself? Perhaps a feeling of suffocation in Happy Valley and a need for a new change of pace? Come to think of it, this is the longest I've stayed in one place for a time since I left home in 2003 - now five years later, I am feeling the itch of travel and wanderlust, to move somewhere (most likely back home) to try my luck and start anew.

Either way, school is hard, and will hopefully get easier as I plow into a major I enjoy, but I want to be over and done with. It's the area of my life that I get the least amount of enjoyment. To many of my friends who are graduating, school is a haven to hide from the "real world," the ivory tower in which they don't have to get a job or a career - they can lurk amongst the dark library stacks for eternity, among what is familiar to them. For me, school is a milstone I carry around my neck. I can't wait until I can finally take it off.