Lilly

Lately I feel like I’ve been seeing the future. My future. I see it in Tom Wolfe’s book The Right Stuff, and in The Right Kind of Crazy by Adam Steltzner (the guy who led the team to put the Curiosity rover on Mars), and in the physics textbook I found online to self study this summer, and in the class listings for special first-year seminars at my future alma mater—including the enchanting title “Extrasolar Planets and Astrobiology.” Sometimes the future is scary. Sometimes it looks like it’s going to be all work and no reward for the rest of my life. Sometimes it’s exciting anyway. In any case, it’s becoming altogether more clear.

It’s a kind of precognition that I know shows only one version of my future. It’s wont to change. Maybe all the people who do a double take when I say I want to go into physics will be right—”Physics?” they always repeat after me, “Really? Are you sure? Well, you know, almost everyone changes their major at least once. I would’ve pegged you for English myself.”

I smile without my teeth. “Yeah, who knows, right?”

But where those people used to foster doubt in me, now they foster defiance. Why are they so surprised? I want to ask. And not only that, but why does it have to be just one or the other? Maybe I like writing and math. Maybe I like learning how to think both ways—”use both sides of my brain,” my mom calls it. Maybe literary analysis and debugging programs aren’t as different as people seem to think they are.

So, to the person who said I would end up as a history major eventually, one way or another: If I leave the physical sciences completely, it’ll almost certainly be for linguistics. To the person who said this one programming problem was so easy, they wrote a solution using just two for loops, Lilly if you can’t do that then it’s just gonna get harder from here: I solved it using only one. To the person who said, all nice and condescending, that my answer to a calculus problem in class was so close, but not quite right, don’t worry, you’re almost there: You were doing it wrong. I checked. ♦