Anthony Vecchi
Personal Statement
My career goal is quite simple, not to have a career. I am an artist, and thus must lead a life of destitution and free wheeling adventures across the world. I must meet strange women who have unusual desires, but enough money to support me while I compose music unfettered by obligation. My job is not to study, but to take acid and get on a euro-bus across southern
Of course, one’s mind and body could not possibly withstand such a life for greater than 5 or 10 years until it either unhinged itself from reality or dissolved. After I have thus rolled around in the dirt of worldly and creative experience, I will rise and dust off my jacket, sit down behind a lovely cedar desk, and begin to read – and then to teach. If my college experience has afforded me anything it is the realization that I despise the greater portion of academia. Fools like me are sucked under the current of commercialized professionalism, chasing the illusion through candy colored hills of deceit. Well… no more.
When I return to the classroom it will be with a wave of vigor gathering behind my back. I will crash down upon my work and shake the very tenons and mortises of that old log cabin I spent so much time sitting in. I will stand, I will stand with the experience of having lived my life and chased my dreams with scraped knees and callused fingers to prove it all. I shall never sit in a chair again unless old age takes away my faculty of upright composure. I promise myself this right now on this very page.
From my disdain of schoolwork and study will sprout a revolution. Even now I know the modes of pedagogy to which I will consume and birth anew. There is enough ennui to be had at a desk, let me kick it over and jump across to the other side. Fortunately I was given the chance to act as a teaching assistant and thus removed myself from the drudgery and simple challenges of coursework. As a teacher I had control and a medium to reverse any frustrations I had with the static nature of learning. For 3 semesters I gave a fresh spirit to the work, failed many times in doing so, but managed to succeed in galvanizing myself and students through the realization of passion. I discovered that by transmuting my abhorrence of the classroom into creative endeavors I could uncover mountains of golden satisfaction and enlightenment, not only for myself, but for the students alike. My track in learning may have been professional writing (which is truly a natural bent of mine) but along the way I took a sidecar over to teaching junction, and by golly if a gopher didn’t eat my sassafras roots last spring, I think I’m going to stay… but not yet.
At the age of 23 I must follow other pursuits and return later with physical and spiritual knowledge. I could never guide a young mind if I first did not follow my own (to use the parlance of the college) “track.” I’m going to make my own track for here on out, I can’t follow those rusty rails any longer. I’ll be back someday, returning to the old station with a fresh bucket of paint and a maul. I’ll tear it down and build something new, of my own design, and stand proud knowing I lived life according to the greatest power known to humanity – myself.
-Anthony Vecchi
