Although school's out, I have not been free from worries about college. Specifically, how to best make use of one's academic abilities to work toward an actual career. Admitting career concerns to academic decisions has always irked me, though. To be sure, I have an interest in fetching a respectable job- then I could finally give big checks to the good guys whenever election season rolls around- but my material ambitions have never been too great. Armed to the crooked teeth with the philosophy necessary to live the good life, acquired political texts only I could find engrossing, a small but growing collection of mangas, and a few soda pops courtesy of the parents, I have need of little more. And the best men to emulate were happy with equally little. Socrates, remember, could barely afford to offer a one mina fine as an alternative punishment to execution. And Our Lord and Savior lived in His Mother's basement for thirty years.

While I have chosen to develop my talents- I expect I would've done so even without my parents' encouragement, but as for filling out all the loan info without Mom's help, that's another story- there remains an undue amount of pressure on high school graduates to shoot for a high-earning job, any high-earning job, even if they couldn't care less about it or the incumbent higher education. In true Lockean spirit, the greatest sin is no longer to put one's talents to ill use, but to leave them idle (Locke, in his Second Treatise, goes on and on about how developed land is ten, and later a hundred times more productive than undeveloped land. This reasoning, which leaves aesthetics and any intrinsic worth to nature aside, was often used to justify the white occupation of Indian lands, which had not been so optimally appropriated by their former owners). While there truly are goods forfeited when a person doesn't aim as "high" as they could given their abilities, we tend to forget the alternative goods to be had when an intelligent, able, moral, logical person takes on a career of a lower order, which they love and in which their good influence will be experienced by others. A job, after all, is like a vocation: choosing the right one is not a science; a lot of it is simply the choice to which a person can give their happiest volition. A dear friend of mine from high school, for instance, chose to work at a local restaurant for at least a few years before doing anything else; now she brightens my day whenever I drop by, a rose in just the right vase. For her and all the other underachieving non-careerists out there, I have penned

Sonnet CXXI

I am entrusted with a flame, by God,
To lighten the consented wont my feet
Are swinging toward to make my times complete.
He gave autonomy His honest nod,
But prods- the talents, small things handled well-
So I might liberally feed the flame,
That it should glow the fiercer, till the same
Lights everyone their way, a helpful Hell.
The compromise will have to be a pale
Rendition of the possible, to send
My feet to any happy, chosen end.
All those, the fewer, who will find my trail,
Encounter truer hopes for they who might
Be navigating with a lesser light.

If I were to give it a title, it would probably be "A Defense of Willful Mediocrity," but that would be too jovial for the tone, minus line 8. I should disclaim that I do not believe such "mediocrity" really requires a "compromise" of God's desires, but nonetheless living well a lesser life is a concept counterintuitive enough to be considered an "unorthodox" way of following the message of the Parable of the Talents. One must always do their best, never letting the Lord's blessings languish wastefully, but on the other hand God can hardly desire these talents be used in making our lives little Hells unto ourselves.