Well, I try my best to be just like I am...

My family and friends enjoy a perennial, good-natured exasperation with my cavalier (or inept, depending who you ask) management of my personal affairs. For this reason, I'm occasionally treated like a precocious but ignorant child... amusing, lovable, but not really fit to be let outside unsupervised. If there's one thing about marriage that fills me with dread, it's the thought of binding myself to a woman who feels this way about me.

I recognize that I can be pretty absentminded and hasty, and I don't always consider all the angles, but I really do believe that I could find a way to stave off destitution and misery without all the babysitting. And even if I couldn't, it might still be preferable.

And I hate the word "underachiever", with all its connotations. It's a polite way to call someone lazy and sloppy, and imply that they lack ambition. I love to work; I just hate drudgery. I'm meticulous, even obsessive, when I care about something; but I believe that life's tasks ought to be afforded time and effort appropriate to their significance in the bigger picture. Some stuff just doesn't matter at all; and it has to be done, but I see no reason why it has to be done perfectly or well. Maybe your peanut butter and jelly sandwiches would be more delicious if you spent an hour each time, measuring out the ingredients and ensuring a liberal and even distribution thereof, carefully applying and reapplying them and leveling your eyes with the table to check the thickness of the peanut butter; but I don't know, maybe you've got stuff to do.

And some people spend their whole lives on the details of these things that are about as important as the peanut-butter-to-jelly ratio on your sandwich--money, status, the opinions and expectations of others--and they wind up old, and with no better idea of what they're doing here than they had when they were our age. Not because they're stupid, but because they've been too busy to think about it. And then they tell me I ought to take a little more pride in how I put my sandwiches together, and offer themselves as living examples of how the course of my life might be corrected; and I love them too much to tell them how deeply disturbing I find that idea.

Of course we have to devote some attention to money, to grades, to society's expectations--as well as, indeed, the proper composition of our sandwiches--but with a healthy recognition that there are more important considerations.

So, in view of the alternative, I am grateful to be the way I am. Maybe I'll miss some opportunities, and I'm sure by the time I'm dead I will have spent thousands of dollars just forgetting where I put things; but I'll be dead. I enjoy being a dreamer, and a thinker, and possessing talents that are useless to employers. I like the fact that my happiness is not dictated by someone else's assessment of my performance. I like that my blood pressure stays at a very respectable, comfortable level most of the time. And I really don't need or want all the nonsense that I could have if I traded it all in.

--Kevin