Looking back on some of the major turning points of my life, I realize most of them have come out of rash decisions. Momentary whims that turned into life paths and completely new directions.

Rash decision one: Give up theater, after a life time of dance classes, voice lessons, summer theater camps, and a performing arts high school, after a terrible college program audition (complete with crying phone meltdown to my mother) and a comment from my high school drama/playwriting teacher that my play read more like a sitcom. Instead of pursuing an BFA in Musical Theater (which I could not have done solely due to lack of necessary talent…) or even a BA in Theater Studies, I decided to major in Television and Film with the new dream of writing for Television. It was quasi based on my lifetime love of television, but looking back, it was also quasi reactionary. Even so, that decision shaped the next four years of my life.

Rash decision number two: Apply to be a counselor at a Jewish summer camp. A completely random decision a the time, having never attended camp myself. It came up after a third or forth viewing of the MTV Documentary “Fat Camp” with my friend Nick my second semester of college, during which I talked about how I almost went to sleep away Jew camp as a kid, but chickened out at the last minute. I thought about how I had nothing to do that summer and about how much fun I’d had the summer before working at a Performing Arts Day camp, and how I’d always secretly wished I had just sucked it up and GONE to camp that summer, so I, of course, randomly started researching and applying to Jewish summer camps in the Midwest. I heard back from several, got hired at one, and proceeded to have the best two summers of my life 20 minutes outside of Cleveland, Ohio, which in turn led to both my amazing Australian adventure with my two camp BFF’s and my third rash decision.

Rash decision number three: Apply to Teach for America. After my second semester junior year experience of interning and hating life in LA, I felt lost. My rash decision to major in TV was looking like an epic failure after discovering I didn’t, in fact, enjoy working in television, and I had no idea what to do with my life. The only vague thought I had was to maybe apply to Emerson to study Theater Education and circle back to my original love of theater and my new found (Thanks to Camp!) love of working with kids. I doubted I would get in, however, with my limited camp experience teaching drama one summer and my one vaguely related to education class, the Politics of Education. Then I saw one of those pesky recruitment signs touting the (horrifying) statistics about low-income schools, which reminded me of all the things I learned were broken in the education system in my one education class. I went to an info meeting, told my mom I was thinking about applying, and filled out the application in a day, figuring I would let fate decide, since I didn’t really have faith in my decision making skills at the time. Then a funny thing happened. Fate decided I should be a teacher.

And that’s where I am now. One year into my two-year commitment to TFA, which is when everyone in TFA starts asking “What are you going to do next Spring when you finish?” They, of course, are asking so they can steer you into staying in education, thus fulfilling step two of their two-part plan to close the education gap. And for the first time in a while, I’m not feeling like making a rash decision that will throw me in a completely different direction.

Maybe it’s just because my life is going pretty well right now that I don’t feel like changing it and, eventually one small blip will send me looking at law school applications, but for now, for the first time ever, I’ve drafted out a plan for the next five years of my life, based on where I am now right now. It’s weird to write out where I want to be five years into the future, because for the last five years, my plans have been changing and evolving on a regular basis. There has never been a constant, because I have always felt unsure, like I wasn’t good enough to act or I wasn’t cut-throat enough for Hollywood. It’s kind of scary to feel stable and to plan, because I have a history of planning and then pursuing those plans only to chuck them out the window and do something totally different. I even wrote my college admissions essay about how I did this, and after that, I changed my mind again!

But maybe those rash decisions were all just leading me here, to the place I was supposed to end up. I just had to make those giant, seemingly random leaps because I wasn’t going to get to this place fast enough unless I made mistakes, took on random jobs and left a few things up to fate.

Maybe planning just feels scary, because, as I’ve seen, life doesn’t go according to plan, and I’m just afraid to fail. In the past, as my plans have changed or been only a few months ahead of me, I’ve never technically failed. I’ve gotten everything I’ve really tried to do. I don’t know how I would handle it if I made this plan, went for it with all I had, and then didn’t succeed.

Then again, life is scary and unpredictable, as I’ve seen, and I might fail, but I think I need to focus on the fact that right now, in this moment, I’m so incredibly grateful that I made those decisions, and that life, unpredictably, brought me here to this place where I can make plans for my future, because when I think of what my life would have been had I not made those random, rash decisions, I wouldn’t have all the life experience that is now factoring into my plans. I guess I just have to trust that even if life doesn’t go according to the plan, it can still lead you to a good place.

I have severe grass is always greener syndrome. I look forward to trips then long to sleep in my own bed the whole time. I order one dish at a restaurant and instantly regret all the others I didn’t get. I look at other people and ruminate endlessly about how whatever their situation is, it’s endlessly better than mine. I went to LA and couldn’t wait to get back to Boston, and by the time I ended my senior year in Boston, I was itching to get back to LA. I’m restless and unpleasable. It makes me wonder if I’ll ever be happy or satisfied with what I have or if I’ll always be thinking about what I don’t have.

As I’ve become tired and had a few more bad days teaching – not that they’re all bad or that I’m not happy- I’ve wondered, and I really hate admitting this, but I have wondered if I made the right decision. Is this really what I want to be doing for the next two years? Would I be happier if I’d taken my other proposed path – staying in Boston, studying theater education, possibly working at my old theater job?

This weekend didn’t help. I spent most of the weekend driving back and forth between LA and Berkeley, as my friends and I took a quick road trip to see American Idiot at the Berkeley Repertory Theater. During the show, I almost started crying and not just because the show was phenomenal, which it most definitely was. (If you will be in the New York area next year, get tickets to see it on Broadway! I’m predicting it will be a hit. I mean, Green Day music PLUS the creative team behind Spring Awakening? What’s not to like?)

I got emotional and nostalgic because it reminded me how much I love theater and how much I miss being connected to it. Theater was my life growing up, and I definitely took my ridiculously amazing work-study job at the professional theater connected to my university for granted. I mean, I got free tickets to Broadway-caliber professional shows and got to spend my weekends hanging out with the cast of those shows…as my job. I had conversations about art and life, as well as boggle tournaments, with professional actors from all over the country while doing my homework, and I got paid for it. I mean, I definitely enjoy that my job now is much more challenging and, ultimately, more important that that job was, but I miss being around those kinds of people, I miss being around stage doors, and costume designers, and opening night parties, and overtures. I miss what I experienced this weekend, and I hate living in a town where that experienced is consistently undervalued.

And all that makes me think I’m not yet where I should be. I know I won’t be teaching forever, or at least, not teaching English forever, because theater is too important to me. Eventually, I hope to combine my love of theater with my teaching experience now by getting my Masters like I planned if I hadn’t gotten into TFA, but in this moment, riding the high of live musical theater and my road trip fever, two years feels like forever to be away from that world….and I keep wondering if I made the right call.

I knew the moment that the flamboyant boy two rows behind me yelled “WHAT TEAM!?” and everyone around him answered with a resounding “WILDCATS! GET YOUR HEAD IN THE GAME!” that I had made a smart decision: to travel downtown at 11:30PM on a Thursday night to take in what could possibly be the third and final saga of the greatest high school related musical trilogy of our time. Yes, I just attended a midnight showing of High School Musical 3: Senior Year (Most original title EVER!)

And…it…was….AWESOME!

From the first frighteningly close, close-up of a sweaty Zac Efron in his signature Wildcat basketball uniform, which was met with resounding yells and catcalls from all women and gay men in the audience (which was, save for about five sad boyfriends, everyone in the audience), to the gratuitous slow-motion, pink-covered entrance of Sharpay Evans (the inspiration for my Halloween costume: pictures coming soon), to the eight moments Troy and Gabriella almost kissed (including one where he is IN HER BED ROOM. AT NIGHT. WITH CHOCOLATE COVERED STRAWBERRIES! What are you DOING Disney?!), to the awkward forced sexual tension between an obviously gay Ryan and a pre-pubescent looking Kelsi, to…to…every last awkward, subltly sexual, over-the-top, ridiculous, dance-filled moment of the whole movie, I and everyone in the audience (made up almost entirely of 18-20 year old theater students, thanks to our chosen theater’s location in the heart of Emerson College) soaked up every minute: clapping, yelling, awwing, possibly crying, dancing, and swooning. (Zac Efron’s arms could star in their own movie…and don’t even get me STARTED on the gratuitous and immensely satisfying naked back shots in the locker room…)

I think it might be my favorite one yet, but that might also be because I got to enjoy it with a room full of college kids who also like to ironicly love and obsess over children’s programming (as further evidenced by the round of applause Miley Cyrus got during the previews) as opposed to watching in the living room with my dad, whose entire review of High School Musical 2 was “Well, that’s two hours of my life I’ll never get back.”

So, I implore you, if your life has sucked lately, if you are stressed, angry, sad, or at all just plain ticked off about the world (and let’s be honest, there’s a lot to be just plain ticked off about), get yourself into a theater full of theater-loving, Zac Efron-obsessed girls and gay men and escape for a while. After the cast members take their final bows and do one last freeze frame jump in front of that famous red curtain, go home and download the soundtrack to try to hold onto that feeling. My soundtrack is downloading from iTunes as we speak. Let’s hope this helps.

Last week, my friend Lauren informed me that she was driving home (which happens to be 20 minutes from my “home,” aka where my parents live), and asked if I wanted to go with her so she wasn’t sitting in her car alone for 6 hours. After checking with my mom to make sure my parents were going to be home and not off running some half marathon somewhere, which happens more often than you would think, and learning that  my parents were actually going to visit  my sister in NYC for her birthday, I happily agreed to go.

Friday, we embarked on our journey from Boston to the Philadelphia adjacent area (Note: neither of us live in Pennsylvania. The East Coast is weird.) The ride down was fun and pretty normal, except for us spotting the first of many personalized license plates, which read “STOPAIDS”. (“I think that’s the weirdest way you could choose to show your activism.) We did get stuck on the New Jersey turnpike for over 2 hours, but as far as traffic goes, it was pretty par for the course. 

Saturday, my parents informed me that we were leaving at 7:00 to drive to Newark and take the train into Penn Station. Thus, I hurled myself out of bed at 5:45 (!!!) after not falling asleep until after midnight, since my body clock doesn’t usually allow me to sleep until 1AM, only to learn while I was drying my hair at 6:30 that we probably weren’t leaving until 8. (I learned this from my half asleep mom who stumbled downstairs at 6:30 having just woken up.) Thanks, parents! 

After driving and training into NYC, we ended up on Bleeker Street, where I immediately found a shoe store where numerous salesmen quickly learned how easy it is to sell me things. I ended up  buying some adorable new flats to replace the ones I wear all the time to the point that they have developed some attractive holes in the bottom. Stephanie met us there and bought some boots for herself. (I was very close to buying the last pair in the store, but out of sisterly love, I let her have them as birthday present.) We then got some delicious Indian food for lunch, as Steph was appalled my mom and I had never had Indian food. My mom and I decided that while it was good, all Indian food, from the soup to the curry to the rice pudding we got free for dessert, all kind of looks the same.

We then headed out the main attraction, Alter Boyz! The show is an off-broadway musical about a Christian boy band. It was HILARIOUS. Basically the boys – Matthew, Mark, Luke, Juan, and Abraham (who’s Jewish) are on the last leg of their tour, during which they try to save the souls of everyone in the audience through the power of (amazingly catchy) pop music. I’d heard the music before, but the guys who were in it were all adorable and made it seem like new. They also made it seem like a legitimate boy band concert. (I should know, having been to FAR too many boy band concerts.) My favorite had to be Mark, who sings my favorite song, “Epiphany,” a lovely piece about being a Catholic that is actually about Mark’s poorly hidden homosexuality. Fabulous. Some guy (Neil…some, SYTYCD fans are going to yell at me for not appreciating this…) from “So You Think You Can Dance,” who Stephanie and I speculated may have been the only straight guy in the cast (proven by his shout out to his girlfriend in the Playbill) was Luke. I always love a TV tie-in. Anyway, I’d recommend it to anyone. Even my dad liked it. 

After that, we walked around Central Park and got a bite to eat at a diner until we had to head back. It was a fun little jaunt into the city, but like every time I head into New York, I became more convinced that it’s just a place I like to visit and not somewhere I could actually live. I am, however, looking forward to when I’m going back with my friends to see “Title of Show”‘s closing performance in October! 

This morning, I got up at a more reasonable hour and met Lauren to drive back to Boston. We managed to see many MANY more amazing license plates: BRIZZ, I-80, T COACH, T JAY 1, OMSAI (which we didn’t quite understand) JTDC (which Lauren is convinced stands for “Jesus Tap Dancing Christ”), and our personal favorite, a Massachusetts license plate which proudly proclaimed “FROM NJ,” which we we almost took a picture of in a rest area parking lot, but then people came back to their car, and I didn’t want to look crazy. This, of course, prompted us, not to stop trying to take the photo, but to run back to our car, jump in, and FOLLOW THE PEOPLE ONTO THE HIGHWAY. We are actually insane. I did get a picture though…of all of the plates listed above. I might have looked crazy and stalkerish, but these are going to make an amazing facebook album. 

Now I’m back in my apartment, waiting to watch the next episode of Mad Men and dreading the busy week I have ahead. I am happy, though, that I finally got to take advantage of the fact that my parents now live within driving distance of Boston.