I just finished Fitzgerald’s Tales of the Jazz Age. My major takeaway—I don’t want my life to be under the control of others. I don’t want to forego adventures because I’ll have to adventure alone. I don’t want to just sit home and breathe. I want to go out and meet people and take pictures and think and sit under the one tree on 2nd Ave. and write and imagine myself at some wonderful point in my life. Surrounded by a handfull of the world’s 7 billion main characters.

Now I’m going to watch Midnight in Paris and start Hemingway’s memoirs (A Moveable Feast) if I’m awake enough. Because while I can’t rush out right now and create stories worth writing about, I can romanticize the shit out of already extant adventures. And tomorrow I can go to ICP and look at Magnum Photos contact sheets and imagine myself in Kenya with a Leica, chasing lions and stories.

And I can start to think about designing my own major when I transfer schools—storytelling. Because I realized that, at heart, I want to be a storyteller. I want to tell not only my own stories, but the stories of people and places who might not have anyone else to sit in front of child humanity, and read out the picture book of their existence. Through words and photographs. I want to document. I want to be a photographic and narrative historian. I’d also be content with helping people tell their own stories, or somehow helping people gain the chance to start filling the pages of their life. It was rewarding to think up an NGO that could help people.

I want to do so many things.