20's are the toughest

Lauren R. has been writing about experiencing and dealing with her quarter-life crisis.

I feel guilty that I have yet to post to her blog not just as a classmate but as someone who has lived through this period of time and found that, yes, it's probably the hardest. (I graduated from college when unemployment was 10%, moved to rural NC to find a job-a big transition for me, worked for companies acquired by larger corporations way before the words outplacement and dislocated were invented, had both parents diagnosed with cancer during my 20's). I haven't gotten really old yet so I should wait and see what's next but generally speaking, it's not easy. Quarterlife is probably not made easier by affluence as a child. But this affluence is not what leads to the crisis. The difficulty, I think, is that we can't see where our actions, choices, etc. will lead us. We want to know the rest of the story and we want to know that it ends reasonably well.

This is what I've found (and I'm paraphrasing from a quote that I read a while back): "You can anything you want; you just can't everything you want." That's the way it seems to work-you usually get what you prioritize.

It's a stretch for me but this leads me to Lauren's latest essay on cataloguing the Internet. Can we have "virtually" everything? That is can we archive everything? and should we? Lauren gives examples of archive projects; they look interesting but all-consuming timewise to me. Still they are wonderful resources and I am glad to know of them. I will add another resource to hers, one I read about last year: it's ibiblio (http://ibiblio.org) and the certificate program's own Serena Fenton worked on this project.