So, I went to college. Twenty thousand dollars later and 144 days from now, I will have a BA in English. And now, I finally, finally know what I want to do with my life. Today, I discovered my dream job.

I want to be a mushroom picker.

I almost wish I were kidding. In Pittsburgh, there is an old coal mine converted into a mushroom farm. So every day, some people put lights on their head and go down into the pit of the world, to methodically fill cardboard boxes with little white mushrooms. Then, they climb back into the world and go home.

I covet that job. And I want the night shift. I don't sleep well anymore. I'm stressed and I'm tired. More than anything in the world, I want a job where I climb into the ground and stay there all night doing something helpful and simple until the sun comes back up. Then, when the sun is back, so am I, and the job stays in the hole in the ground where I left it.

On the one hand, I wish I hadn't spent 20k figuring this out. On the other hand, that 20k helped my writing, and if I hadn't spent it, I probably would never have figured it out. College would have been the great white whale that bit off my penis. Or something. I don't know. All I remember from Moby Dick is Dr. Lenz rereading the part where "the whale unmanned him" a lot, complete with some wink-wink-nudge-nudging. The (very, very wrong) mental image of a giant white whale taking great care to ever so gingerly bite off Captain Ahabs's penis has never left me.

In any case, when my 144 days are up, I'm going to contact the mushroom people and see if they have a position open. I'm hoping the novelty of a 22 year old writer girl asking if she can please have her dream job of digging up mushrooms will at least get me an interview. I mean, how many other people email them to say, "I'm done writing papers now. Can I come in your hole and harvest your fungus?"

I may be a freak.