For the past week I was in Boston, going through internet withdrawal (is anyone else flabbergasted by in-room internet for $13 a day?), appreciating the cold and winter I don’t have to live with, and wandering the streets on both sides of the Charles, drifting along the streets I used to walk so often during my years at Wellesley.

The city was mostly an escape for me. The Wellesley campus was stifling and isolating, and so I endured the nearly hour-long journey into Boston and Cambridge, bumping along a rickety Peter Pan bus which, on the weekends, usually carried people who were drunk, obnoxious, or boyfriends of students, sometimes all three. The stench of vomit was not uncommon.

The evil squirrels are still the same.

I was probably most excited about going to Chinatown to finally eat some tasty Chinese food. Boston is far closer to China than South Florida, whose dearth of edible Chinese food and Trader Joe’s I shall not cease to lament.

I took the bus and walked for hours, even in the cold, from Chinatown to MIT, from Kendall Square to Harvard Square and everywhere in between. I returned to Taiwan Cafe, the best Chinese in Boston, ordering the eggplant that I dreamed of even while eating eggplant in China,

Plus Three Cup Chicken

And mustard greens with edamame and tofu slices

For a while, I could get away from my unhappiness within the small, carefully landscaped confines of campus and feel like I was part of society, and daydream about the days when I would be Wellesley-free, and have direction and a path.

And yet there I was last week, two and a half years later, walking the same streets I walked as a film student, and wishing I could have warned myself to major in something more applicable to the real world, but then it seems that nothing is really applicable to the real world anymore, because now the real world is online.

It’s thoroughly frustrating to have spent so much money on education and reap no real rewards from it. Being back in Boston, amongst all the brick buildings and spindly trees, I felt as though I’d almost gone nowhere.

The ‘real world’ is disillusioning and frustrating. What jobs are suitable for a film major? The fact that I speak Chinese seems of no more use than a parlor trick in Florida. I feel like I’m languishing in the sea breeze and constant sunshine. I know I can do anything, and yet it seems like there is nowhere to do it. The internet is spilling over with blogs like mine, with more traffic, ads, book deals. Who needs another one? Who needs another food/travel writer/photographer? It seems like the market is cornered, crowded, over-crowded. What is left? Where is my niche?

And so I guess that living in the real world means living with that existential wonder of where I fit in geographically, economically, socially, photographically, blog-ically.

And really, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say with my Boston photos, you all get to wonder with me. Welcome to my world! Feel free to share your existential woes or philosophies below, and comfort yet another person in the midst of a ‘quarter-life crisis.’