The Future's So Bright?

I wrote this on the train a couple days ago...

There's a prissy French woman in the seat across from me. She has a young boy, maybe 6 or 7, in the seat next to her. He's working some kind of puzzle or word game, and she stares down at his paper through her little librarian glasses.

Every once in awhile, she glances back at me and glares through the dark rims as though she suspects me of cheating off her son. She's wearing a cardigan around her shoulders, a look I tease a friend for also wearing by joking that it makes her look like a villian from an 80s movie. The Frenchwoman is no different - except to say that she looks like a villian from a Hitchcock thriller.

And in the seats behind me, there are loud American children jabbering away about SpongeBob and shouting back at their mom about their MP3 players.

Sometimes I worry about the longterm effects of the Iraq War, that it will bring about the downfall of our country and economy and will be the end to the US as a world power. It's separating us so much from our Western allies.

Tonight, I worry it's too much TV and an oversaturation of media. Combined with inattentive parents who are too consumed with the latest US Weekly and the continuing Britney/Kevin divorce saga to bother with rearing our future leaders. Then again. Maybe I'm just having a bad day.

I worry a lot about the future. My favorite question lately is, "What is going to become of me?" Because I really don't know. I can't seem to make much sense of anything anymore. I have reason to celebrate and be happy, yet I feel dismayed and discouraged. What is that about? And I ask myself why I would want to leave what has become my new home and my new family for the setting of a painful past? Which future should I risk?

I worry sometimes that I'm too fickle and addicted to adventure or drama. So much so that I cause it to disrupt peace and calm and destiny.

But that's a grim view of oneself and a bleak outlook at what lies ahead.

Why now? How can something that's good cause hurt? Maybe because it's difficult, it will have great rewards. Maybe I should trust my desires and that they will lead me on the right path. I need to be a bit more positive about the future.

Which is hard to do. Especially when the little French boy is singing a song about learning numbers while the Americans are rapping behind me.