what am i getting myself into???

When I decided to come to London for a semester, I knew (being the crazy idealistic and over-excited person that I am) that I would get myself into way too much...and I did. I was lucky enough to squirm my way into an internship (sadly unpaid, or course) at the London bureau of the Los Angeles Times, and it has been a blast so far. I've gone to press conferences and to the Royal Courts of Justice at the Strand. Most recently I interviewed the oldest worker in Britain, a 101-year-old man named Buster who's currently training to run the London marathon (26.2 miles!). (The man is a machine! I tagged along for a 3-mile training the other day, and at the end he had 2 cigarettes with a beer before going out for another 3 miles! If you offer him water, he gets insulted...)

And yet, I find myself slacking a bit in terms of motivation. I've always worked very hard to get to a certain point (for years it was college, now it's career), and now I've got this incredible opportunity and I find myself unable to take advantage of it to the fullest. This has brought on a pseudo-quarter-life-crisis (a term I'm hearing more and more among my college friends and twenty-somethings), which sounds sooo pathetic for so many reasons. One, I'm 21! I have my whole life ahead of me, under no circumstances am I entitled to freak out now! It's too soon!!! Two, I'm constantly afraid that I'm doing the wrong thing, but I can't figure out what the right thing is...and I'm not the only one! Most of my peers feel the same way, and none of us can figure out why (which makes me tend to believe it's got to do with some crazy societal pressure to be competitive and get ahead in life – know where you're going and get there!) But really all this does is make us all miserable (and subsequently useless), rendering us even more pathetic because we're whining about life when in reality we shouldn't yet have anything to whine about at all. And even though I know better, I can't stop myself! I'm trapped in a downward existential spiral (constantly feeling like I'm squandering my chances, chances I need to take).

I told myself, for example, that I wanted to go into journalism, print journalism no less, knowing full well that it's struggling (especially in the US). I saw it as a calling – a very principled, selfless thing to do, for the betterment of the world (I think big apparently). And it's a cut-throat business it seems, and yet, I jumped in (or tried – I think I ended up with one of those jumps where you dip your toes in five or six times first to test the waters, and every time they're just as icy and terrifying). But here I am, using this as a stepping stone to something else, still unsure of what or where that something is (but hoping to all hell that it's not where I'm at now).

One of the perks of my internship (and it's fun and extremely satisfying, don't get me wrong) is that I get an email address at the Times. Thea.Chard@latimes.com. (It's amazing how gratifying having an email address that no one uses but massive inter-company listserves can be). Tonight I decided to bite the bullet and go through a bunch of said all-staff emails I have received over the last few weeks. I was shocked to find most of them final farewells from colleagues who were leaving the paper, most surely for good (as they kindly said goodbye to their co-workers and very bluntly told their corporate heads exactly what they thought of them).

I couldn't believe the numbers! I must have received twenty or so of these farewells in a matter of about a week. Most of them praised those they were leaving behind, triumphantly encouraging them to "stick together" and wait for the business to take a turn. "If there's any justice left in this industry," one wrote, "it will get better."

I knew what I was doing when I decided to try my hand in this world, but here I am, just getting started, and at every turn I meet giant red flags issuing forewarning. Some of these people, whose names I know from when I sorted mail and ran errands as an editorial assistant a few months ago, have been in the company for 20 to 30 years, and now have to leave with their principles in tact but their spirits broken (or at least damaged by the "business" news has become).

I saved some of the better emails, the ones that sentimentally called for strength and perseverance in such times, the ones that abandoned caution and called out the company, the

My favorite farewell: "Note to the resident bully & business genius: why not follow the example of every ten year old who's ever run a lemonade stand, and stop trashing the product."

Here's hoping.