Eminently practical and yet appropriate as always.

My title tonight comes from the Sweeney Todd movie soundtrack, which I've been listening to nonstop since it was released.
I really, really want to see that movie.
I saw "Juno" this weekend. I seriously don't think I've ever been so entertained by dialogue in my life. Every single line made me laugh (I'm not even kidding).
I successfully located my ex-English teacher yesterday. It took me a long time to find the guy, but I eventually was able to pull his class schedule from the tangled BYU website. A select few of us are going to go visit him one of these days.
I'm writing from my pretty, new Mac laptop. I love it to death.

The research proposal I've been writing has been the best learning experience I've had in high school so far. And it isn't even an assignment. Go figure. Because of my work on this formal proposal, I've taught myself technical writing in APA format, learned to locate and interpret literature related to my subject, researched subtopics within the related literature when I realized I couldn't understand anything if I wasn't familiar with the vocabulary of the specialty...the list goes on and on.
This is what school should be like.
I find myself putting off the homework assignments I should be doing over the break because they now seem absolutely trivial compared with my little pet project.
Ironic.

You know what I've been thinking about lately?
Professions.

It's interesting to me that every profession attracts a certain type of person. Take, for example, the surgeon stereotype: arrogant, egotistical and easily irritated, but for good reason--they know they're the best, so they deserve to act like it. Or the nurse complex. I don't care where you work--if you're a nurse, you have this complex. If you've worked in a hospital, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Law attracts adversarial egotists with highly developed verbal skills, psychology draws pensive observers (or those who would seem so), and engineering appeals to the socially dysfunctional who feel more comfortable with integrals and matrices than human beings. Yes, I know these are stereotypes, but you have to admit that stereotypes are universally understood for a reason--because most of the time, they're right on.
Which leads me to a question I've focused on lately: which type does education attract?
Teaching is probably the most egotistical profession I can imagine. In what other career do you get paid for listening to yourself speak every day, expecting students to think your ideas matter, and making an analysis of how well the student will do in the future based on how well they listened to you? It's interesting.
I don't think I could ever stand teaching high school.