Nah I'm not getting married, but a few of my friends have, which is neat and horrifying. Six months ago I had class two hours a day and my biggest fear was that I'd poor a bowl of cereal only to realize I was out of milk. Now my biggest fear is that a close friend will tell me he's gonna be a daddy.
In short, what the hell happened? What happened to Four Lokos in a 7-Eleven parking lot? Or writing every damn day because free time not only existed but flourished; or worrying about defending your fantasy basketball title; or writing lengthy emails in response to bullshit ones about Oregon football pride from the school's athletic director; or napping.
Yesterday I gave my students a survey that included this question: Finish this sentence, "I think kids today really need to..." Part of the fun of the assignment was that I shared my answers to the questions. (The sarcasm level of previous sentence depends on the class.) My response to the above question was that I think kids need to seriously consider their futures because they're going to come faster than they hope, which is reallydangfast.* As I said that line multiple times throughout the day, I thought more and more about myself at their ripe, naive age, and all the memorable, defining times coming their way, and these thoughts inevitably led to nostalgic ones. If you're my age then you probably know what I'm talking about. If you're not, you may remember fondly, if somewhat hazily, what this is like. Here's my skinny* on this post-college, very reflective stage of life. |
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2. You send and receive letters–as in friggin' mail–to friends because you miss them so damn much. (Corina, I'm still working on yours.)
3. You call your sister because you miss her. This novelty also happened at the beginning of college, but this time it's different. This time it makes you feel sort of, well, old–like your childhood is deader than Miley Cyrus's status as a role model for kids.
4. You wake up to the fresh smell and sizzling sounds of frying bacon. Then your fantasy-dream ends abruptly by your dreaded alarm. You stumble into the kitchen, pour a bowl of cereal, and open the fridge only to find you're out of milk. Some things never change, you think.
5. You get a paycheck that's considerably above minimum wage, and you weep. Then you think of the college loans you still have to pay off, so you continue to weep, just...differently.
6. You pirate a movie from a website, but only get through half of it before falling asleep. At 9 p.m.
7. Facebook friends put up picture after picture of their children, so you vomit. After cleaning up, a close friend calls. He tells you that he's "ninety-nine percent sure that she's the one," so you vomit again in the same spot, so you have to clean it up again.
8. You ride a bike around because you're trying to put off buying a car for at least three paychecks. You get ambitious at the store and buy $110 worth of groceries. You put four bags in your two backpacks, one bag on the back of the bike, and three on the handlebars. You imagine your two bulging backpacks must look like a human turtle shell. You liken yourself to Quasimoto on wheels. You ride home in shame. You take a shower and the shame doesn't wash off because you know you'll have to ride to school tomorrow–the only bicyclist on a bike-lane-less road. You remember college, when riding a bike was normal. Then you recall that your calves are looking a little bigger lately, and the shame wanes somewhat.
9. You play basketball once a week, if that, and after each session your ankles ache and your left knee throbs for two days.
10. You buy hummus. And you eat it.
11. You sit in your room all day on a Saturday. Your most productive moment comes when you enter grades for thirty minutes. Your most productive Saturday moments in college came when you edited a story for thirty minutes. You reflect on how your productive Saturdays in college were at least intellectually stimulating and not the brain-numbing tedium that is entering grades.
12. Your roommate asks where you learned to cook. You quickly let her know that you don't know how to cook, you're just faking it. However, the mere fact that she made that assumption makes you feel far removed from your days of cracking an egg into top ramen and feeling good about it.
13. When you turn on the TV, you invariably flip to the news, which, you remember thinking as an eight-year-old, is a quintessential old-person thing to do. But after a few minutes you're reminded how you loathe news broadcasts, so you turn off the TV. So generally you don't really watch TV, another old-person characteristic according to you fifteen years ago. (Realizing that fifteen years ago you were eight years old has such an affect that you feel inclined to include it in this blog.)
14. You continue to use your backpack from college because you're sentimental. Actually it may be from high school. But regardless, it's older than probably anything you own. You can see holes in the bag, and you wonder if the bottom will fall through on one of your trips to the grocery store. Its color in places is turning from gray into a brownish-yellow. On a handle a friend once wrote your name between hearts. You wonder if all your meek attempts at professionalism were wiped away the moment your boss and coworkers saw the pile of shit that is your bag. Then you strangely hope they have; you hope they have come to understand that you will bend but not break in the face of knowing little about the industry you somehow wound up working in (even if it's temporarily), and that you are not intimidated by their leather satchels, dammit. (You look at your JanSport as you write this, lying empty on your floor, with all its compartments open, as if it's sucking in a final dying breath, and you grin.)
15. You eat alone at a restaurant, and you know college is dead and gone. (I haven't done this one just yet, but I know it's coming, and it freaks me out.)