Mr. Keillor,

I am seventeen going on eighteen and moving forward on college research and SAT planning and wondering what I am going to be doing for the rest of my life.

Yet in all of this I have become very apathetic. I don't have a goal or an idea of what I want to do with my life. It is bothersome to be told that you have to decide the entirety of your life in a few short months, but so, I don't really care. I have found that I do not very much care about what happens. At the moment, I don't even want to do my homework.

Do you have any thoughts on this, any observations or rectifications for my situation? How might I find a legitimate goal and the courage to chase it?

- Brendan Laughlin  
Fairfield, OH

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I have to do my work, Brendan, and you have to do yours. The alternative is the long grim slide into torpor and depression, not a pleasant prospect. Take the SAT and prime yourself to do well on it, and look carefully at colleges. The next four years can be a beautiful time in your life, when you gather up your forces and plunge deeply into the sphere of ideas and accomplish intellectual growth that will shape your life.  It's quite okay not to know exactly what you want to do with your life. Most people don't live according to a plan. They improvise. I guess you feel deadlines pressing on you but they're not as heavy and irreversible as you may imagine. One thing leads to another: your high school experience points you toward something further. Meanwhile, why not keep a journal of observations this year, as an exercise for your own benefit, to sharpen your experience of your own life. I mean a journal that isn't about your inner life but rather an account of what you see and hear around you. More important than having a long-term plan is to live your life with intensity and conviction. Wish you well. 

Dear Mr. Keillor,

I am 38, a Ph.D. candidate in U.S. history for three years at Kent State. I'm writing my dissertation on U.S. civil defense during the Cold War and how gendered language led those efforts to fail. I have written...about 35 pages.

It seems like every few months, I hear about another contemporary earning his or her doctorate, and even though I know I'm a good writer, I'm feeling increasingly inadequate and hopeless.

My question is this: how do you pacify the voices in your head that conspire to make you feel like whatever you write will not be good enough? That if your work is not perfect, even the first time, it means you are an abject failure? In other words, how do you make peace with the omnipresent potential for mediocrity?

Sincerely,
Melissa Steinmetz, a Perfectionist Ph.D. Candidate with Procrastination Problems  

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Welcome to the club, Melissa. A lot of us get discouraged looking at the mess we've made on paper. And one can make an even worse mess on a screen, sprawling windy pretentious paragraphs that any sensible reader would automatically leap over. Writing on a computer is an exercise in mediocrity, if you ask me. Just keep telling yourself: the first draft has to come before the second and the third. All good writing is rewriting. If you're writing on a computer, print out hard copy and revise it with a pencil and then type the revisions into the digital version. Don't give up. There is an embittered editor up in your brain who expects your first draft to be classic literature. Tell him to sit on it and spin. Finish the dissertation before you're 40, kid. At 40, take a year off and work as a chanteuse in a roadhouse, leaning against the baby grand in your little black dress slit up to the thighs, a cigarette in your left hand, singing bittersweet ballads for lovelorn truckdrivers.

Dear Mr. Keillor,

My Bar Mitzvah is this weekend. I need to make a speech. Do you have any advice? Start with a joke?

Ari Rotenberg
Houston TX

p.s. If you're in Houston this weekend, you're welcome to come and bring a friend.

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Dear Ari, We Christians don't have any tradition like this, the Goodbye To Childhood You're On Your Own Now ceremony, but it does strike me that you should've been thinking about this LONG BEFORE NOW, no? Am I wrong? But a joke is fine. Here are two.

You always want to begin a joke by saying, "So!" Pause two beats. Then the joke.

So. There was a big bar mitzvah outdoors in a backyard and all the bees went to enjoy the fresh flowers and fruit and they made sure to wear yarmulkes so people would know they were bees and not wasps.

So. God told his angels he was going away for the weekend and the angels said, "Are you going to visit Earth?" And God said no. "I went down there a couple thousand years ago and got a Jewish girl pregnant and they're still talking about it."

Congratulations and mazel tov and l'chaim, Ari.