You know those movies where the big city hotshot character comes back to their town for the holidays and learns humbling lessons about life and love? Well that apparently played out in real life when Julia Allison—internet fame connoisseur, lifecaster—traveled back to Chicago for Thanksgiving. Between lazily pushing mashed potatoes around her plate and clubbing at "the hottest spot in Chicago," she seems to have experienced an existential crisis that led to a big, HUGE decision that she's of course loudly announced on her website: Julia Allison is going to Business School! And not just any business school. Like some sort of businessy Elle Woods, she's aiming for the crème de la crème: Harvard! And Stanford. What, like it's hard? There are, though, some small flaws in her plan:
Until one of her readers informed her otherwise, she was under the impression that she would need only to take the GREs to apply. (She also worried about there being a math section on the exam. When applying to business school.) Luckily a concerned TMI Weekly fan let her know that one does, in fact, have to subject themselves to the exponentially more difficult GMAT exam, and that she'd need an extremely high score just to get her toe in the door. So, first big hurdle!
The other problem is that she'd want to keep running her NonSociety "business" while freezing away in Boston or toiling away from the sun in Palo Alto. Which... we mean, we don't know how much there is to run, but that sounds ambitious. Isn't there like a lot of studying? Maybe her cohorts Meghan Asha and Mary Rambin could apply, too! Roommates who study and lifecast together! Meghan might do fine, with her hedge fund background, but we'd fret about dear, sweet Mary worrying that head of hers with facts and figures. Thinking makes wrinkles, after all. Though the bigger question is, isn't the old "going to business school" thing kind of the parachute rescue option when one's undertaking isn't proving terribly successful? Could Julia's new life course actually be hinting doom for the site (and experience) that asks (tells?) us to "live differently"?
Though really, movie cliche aside, it is cute to see her so excited and impulsively silly about such a big, tough decision. We can't say we haven't had similar Big Dream longings while languishing at home for the holidays. They're introspective times, because they do embolden, better than any other time of the year, the swift and sometimes harsh passage of time. It's easy to feel an existential tug for something More. (We may have made drunken plans last night to move to Rome for a year in June.) In that vein, we wish Ms. Allison luck.
But srsly. Get off the computer and go hit the books, sister.