Here is My Heart, Here is My Song, There Are Too Many Prophets Here

I watched the season finale of How I Met Your Mother yesterday, and it affected me unusually deeply. I daresay it affected me even more profoundly than Chuck's declaration of love to Blair -- an event that caused Teh Doggeh to kiss both Teeny and me. Specifically, I was moved by Lily's speech to Ted that he needed to stop trying to be an architect when the universe was clearly telling him that it wasn't going to work out and take a leap into doing something else. Lily urged Ted to forget about his rigid plan to be an architect and let his life unfold the way it is going to unfold without worrying about what is supposed to happen.

I am a total Ted, which is probably why I find that character a little dull and annoying. The Ted Show is playing all the time in my head. The main difference is that, unlike Ted, I occasionally do suit up. In this instance, I am married to my belief that I have to be a lawyer and, not only that, but a highly-compensated lawyer. (Frankly, I do not enjoy the law enough to be any other kind. The money is the only thing making this job worthwhile.) I feel like the universe (or whatever) keeps telling me that I'm not meant to do this, much like Ted with architecture. If I was meant to be a lawyer, would it be so hard? I went to a top five law school and yet this is the second time in my short career that I've faced a difficult employment search. I'm not saying that there are not other people out there who have encountered similar or more daunting obstacles, but what I am saying is (1) most of them didn't go to the school I went to and (2) maybe those people aren't meant to be lawyers either.

Where my life diverges from Ted's -- probably mostly because I'm not the main character on a hilarious sitcom -- is in the fact that the universe hasn't presented any obvious alternative path to me. In Ted's case, he had an offer to be a professor at Columbia. The dolt didn't want to take it because of the old saw that "those who can't do, teach." (It occurs to me that a professor of architecture might still be able to design the occasional structure and might, in fact, have enhanced credibility because of his professorial status.) I don't know what else to do or what else I would want to do.

My mom thinks I should be a writer. Obviously, I enjoy writing since I spend a lot of my free time writing a blog that is read by a maximum of two people. But I really only enjoy writing my little blog. I've tried to write fiction, and it never goes well. I have no gift for dialogue, pacing, plot or any of the other things I so enjoy in the fiction I read. My friend Teeny encourages me to go into the travel industry, but I think working in the industry would suck all the joy out of it for me. I have no desire to shepherd a revolving cast of drunk twentysomethings through a foreign country, trying to discourage them from raping the locals or each other, and most of the other jobs in the travel industry are analogous to jobs in any other industry.

I wish someone had left me at the altar so the person for whom he left me could come back to offer me a sweet teaching gig at an Ivy League university. What should I do next? Universe?