My Plan for my Life

I am very carefully considering various career options and my problem is that too many paths lie before me and no impetus pushing me toward one or the other.
• I could teach. It would be hugely rewarding; I’d be giving back to the community and I like dealing with children. The downside is that I don’t want to teach very long (two years at most).
• I could join the military. It would be cool in that I could have a job title that included the word “badass”. I could learn Mandarin Chinese, practice kung fu, shoot big guns, learn covert ops, wear a uniform, pick up chicks, get money to go back to school, and travel the world. The fine print is that any job title that included the word “badass” in it would also have an increased likelihood of getting shot by a guy named “Fahd” who hates all American bastards (maybe I could tell him I’m Nigerian?) or I could just suffer one of any number of horrible fates like the ones we see in the movies (getting vaporized, tortured, dismembered, maimed, poisoned, stabbed, crushed, or beaten). All the while, I’d live by strict rules with people who (by many accounts) are mostly idiots and answer to men who tell me that my name is “Maggot”.
• I could continue to look for a job programming. The upside is that I really like programming. So much so, that on several occasions I ended up doing other people’s school programming projects for the sheer hell of it. (I used to lock myself in my bedroom and write code into the wee hours of the morning, decide the code wasn’t good enough, throw it away and start over the next day.) The downside is that the market is tight and employers are only hiring people with Masters degrees, years of experience, or perfect 4.0 GPA’s to go along with their undergraduate Computer Science degrees. I have none of those things. (I do have a degree but it turns out all the job applicants do and I am not special. I want to be special!)
• I could go back to school. I like hanging out there and everybody’s doing it. I could get a degree in literature and try for a higher GPA this time around. I could try out again for soccer, (the very thought makes my feet itch) prepare for grad school, get a teaching certificate, maybe even brush up on my Spanish. The downside is that I am already approaching 24 in June. I would be in danger of becoming a career student.
So there you have it. I’d say that I am at a fork in the road but really I think it looks like spokes on a wheel. All of them lead in completely different paths and I keep trying to do all of them. It’s enough to make a guy crazy.
P.S. if You're reading this Jen, Yes, I stole the last two posts from an email I wrote you. It's a bad habit which I promise to quit when I stop writing email at 4 am.