With all that has been said and done, where do I go from here? Well, for six months of last year I was a campaign manager for a political candidate running for the Iowa State House, but it wasn't satisfying. Good experience, it taught me a lot, and I liked it, but something was missing, and it was my voice. The thing with political campaigns is that they require you to suppress your voice, your identity, in order to not distract from the candidate. After developing that identity, that voice, that sense of self for four years, it felt wrong.

Writer

Now that I'm back home in Bloomington-Normal, I feel like focusing on my writing. It's been an activity which I've enjoyed throughout college, in part because I like the sound of my voice, in part because it feels like what I should do. There was this class I particularly enjoyed called the Foundations of Western Political Philosophy, and it introduced the class to a great many writers and theories. The philosophers I liked most were the old Greeks, Plato and Aristotle and Socrates, because it seemed to me theirs was the most pure. At the very least, their three thoughts were the basis for the American system--Thomas Jefferson and others were heavily influenced by them--and Plato's Republic is what I want to reference here, as I wrote a summary of it's thesis. 

"To Socrates, justice is fulfilling one's role in society. Each person specializes in one task and relies upon his neighbors to specialize in the tasks that he has no knowledge of....the perfect city comes together as one city and one entity with one purpose; to be the best [they] can be." This is how I feel a perfect world might be organized, and I think my role in that world would be as a writer. I'm terrible with my hands, anyway, so I think it has to be that way.

Comic

One night, while I was still in Dubuque, I went to an open mic night. It took place at a coffee shop/bar on Bluff st. called Monk's Kaffee. I like the joint, it was my favorite haunt and within walking distance from my house. In any event, the short five minutes I joked went okay. It was the first time I'd done something like that, too; for two weeks prior, I would sit at Monk's and stare into space, trying to come up with jokes I might be able to tell sometime. Honestly, the process struck me as none too different than what I did during Mock Trial, when I would also stare into space trying to come up with questions for cross examination and answers for direct examination. Plus, after so much practice standing in front of people talking, I was used to it and didn't get stage fright or nothin'. It's just that my jokes weren't that good, which is why it went okay. Comedy, like writing, will be more of a hobby than anything for the immediate future. But, hey, maybe someday it'll become a career and I'll make money telling jokes.

You tell me if I've got a future in it or not: "let me ask you something, is it appropriate to address body language in conversation? Like, if you're talking to somebody and the other person starts frowning, one might reasonably ask 'why are you frowning?' But what about more subtle expressions, and during polite conversation? I think..."