Or Maybe I'll Just Go to Grad School

Flush with the terrifying prospect of graduating with a journalism degree in 2012, I have begun to entertain the thought of trying to fulfill my most outlandish writing fantasies.
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I was recently made aware that it would be in my best financial interest to graduate from college a semester early. Or rather, my mother, who is pregnant with my fourth brother 13 years after her last, laid it out quite simply: my credit card from the Bank of Mom is set to expire.

Flush with the terrifying prospect of graduating with a journalism degree in 2012, I have begun to entertain the thought of trying to fulfill my most outlandish writing fantasies. These could happen!

Granted, while this panicked, hastily constructed outline of how to write my way out of debt and into self-sustaining riches are literary equivalents of get rich quick schemes, I have dared to be so bold:

-- Write a best-selling memoir that is adapted into a box office smash. I would resolve to just living out the first act of Eat, Pray, Love and allowing Julia Roberts to play me -- anatomical differences notwithstanding.

(But if you've seen Eat, Pray, Love, then you cannot help but be envious of how well-lit Julia Roberts is! With light always hitting her in that flattering, glowing-from-behind-but-looks-like-from-within way. When she smiles it's like a solar flare.)

Of all the literary aspirations to have, this is indeed the most au courant: Self-publishing is very in. Every comedian on a sitcom you watch has written a memoir. If writers truly are a class of creative folks barreling toward insanity, what better therapy then unpacking my crazy as fodder for future high school English essays?

-- Coin a sensational new web meme that becomes a picture book. The kind that they sell at Urban Outfitters and that kids take off the shelves at bookstores and read in their entirety and leave on the floor.

The best part of this particular brand of Internet Fame is that my name would be irrelevant -- people would only care about the meme. I am certain with meme-book money that I could afford for my entire young adult life all of the cable channels, a prudent indication of socioeconomic standing and something I could be very happy with. (Because if you don't have HBO, how do watch all the "Important Television?")

-- Become a social media luminary. The key to this is the ability to blog and tweet irreverently. I do not enjoy using Twitter. It's like an email inbox that constantly refreshes and you can never look away from.

And blogging requires a thematic mold that gracefully skirts the line between clever and lazy. My current ideas: reviewing TV shows without listening to the sound (like I do at the gym!), dog beds, testing day-old bread, or thrift shopping for designer clothes hangers.

Or maybe I'll just go to graduate school.

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