I'm a person who's slow to make decisions. I like to explore my options first, to a ludicrous extent, and even then I go back over them...and over them....and over them.....before finally making a decision, usually a rushed one.

In other words, I'm indecisive.

So you can imagine, since I have several big decisions to make over the summer, I've been a little out of sorts--where will I go to college, what will I major in, how will I pay for it, where will I do my Senior Project in the meantime?

Sometimes, I have to thank God for some of the unpleasant things I have to deal with, because they turn out to be a boon in the end. Take today, for instance--most of those decisions I was waffling about on were made, and all in about three minutes.

So I come home from my lovely friend's birthday party for my brother's birthday party--they're on the same day. And my mom tries to get my dad up a little bit early for Daniel's party.

Well, Dad's been in a deep dark depression lately, off his meds and having to work a lot of overtime and the like. So he didn't get up for the party, but when he did get up, he came in right in the middle of the party--snarked at Daniel all of a sudden for not lifting weights today, then cussed at me for not changing the cat litter yet even though I hadn't been home all day.

Now, I've been waffling around on these decisions because one, I'm under pressure from my dad to get a good career and go to a college close by because he doesn't want me to move far away. I have to get a 32-33 on the ACT so I can get a full scholarship somewhere, and he doesn't care if it's a public or private university, as long as it's payed for--because we won't have the money to do it otherwise. And two, because what I was kind of leaning towards doesn't really fit with what I'm being pressured to do.

But when my father walked into my brother's birthday party and ruined it by telling him to go lift weights, and telling me to "go clean the d*mn sh*t out of the garage," I realized something:

I'm seventeen, and I need to start thinking for myself, even in the company of my own family.

The thing of late is that my father has been asking us to "emotionally prepare ourselves" to move out of our house into a smaller house. He's done this before. Several times. Over several years. I understand this sentiment, and think it might have a legitimate basis--we MIGHT be moving out of our house soon. But I also understand that I can't base my decisions on what I'm doing with the rest of my life on the requests of a man who's asking me to emotionally prepare myself to leave my house, when he is not emotionally preparing himself for me to grow up, move out, and get a job.

In the next three minutes, I made several decisions:

1.) I will never, ever swear at my family. Ever. It's wrong.
2.) I'm going to Union University. Five hours away. In Jackson.
3.) Yes, that means I'm also going to move out of the house.
4.) I will pay for Union with every single scholarship I can get my darn grubbing hands on--and there's a lot of them when you have a 31 on your ACT and a portfolio like mine. And when the scholarships run out, I will get a job or take out a student loan like everybody else does. But I will never, ever ask my parents for money.
5.) I'll probably get a job anyway. Because I can't hide in my house for the rest of my life fearing that ninjas will kill me in my vocation, as my Dad would have me do.
6.) For now, my major is neurology or something like that. It'll probably change--the average college student changes majors two or three times over the course of their career.

So now all I have to do is decide where my Senior Project's going to be.