College, You Whore

One day you wake up after a long, refreshing sleep. You rub your eyes, stretch and get out of bed. That is assuming you didn’t wake up with both of your arms asleep from falling face-down, drunk into “bed” (if you count your mangled, twisted arms underneath you as a bed). In such a situation, you rise like some sort of horrid Dr. Frankenstein’s experiment screaming and flailing your lifeless arms in terror. But wait, my readers, don’t run off! My arms are quite alive now, and my hands weave through sticky cheese and bean encrusted keys to tell you an ongoing story of importance to you and to all. You see, as I was saying, one day you wake up, and you realize that you’re truly living with the disease that is being a twentysomething. And before you pelt me with rotten vegetables (depending on your contentious definition of vegetables) for using such a clichéd word coined by some suicidal television show writer, I beg for the consideration that my life as of now is the very cliché which the word twentysomething harbors. It’s an apt fit.

Now I am haunted by questions that bring to light the uneasy feeling of a shifting identity with radically different social expectations:

I am no longer a student after being one for sixteen years. Who am I as a non-student?

I am no longer living in an isolated pseudo-leftist community of scared white people. Is it safe to download one of Noam Chomsky’s works in the form of e-book onto my iphone to share my knowledge of the preface with a black family I just met in the subway?

I need a real job. Will my obscure knowledge of Arthur Schopenhauer’s love of poodles and its potential significance on his philosophy be relevant to my application for an entry-level position as a junior manager for Cardboard Boxes and DumbShit Co.?

I need to have friends, hobbies and fun, but in a very distinct tone from the my college years. Do you mind if I barf two bottles of Yellowtail Pinot Noir all over your Ikea furniture and cheese platter during scattergories while my friends break all your windows and chase your pets?

I can’t help but feel this resentful, bitter awareness that society has had it out for me. Somebody somewhere is pointing a big finger and saying “You had your goddamn fun for far too long, and now, it is time to break you down!” A dog thrown out of the house, scratching feverishly at the door to be let back in -- too unsure of himself, too proud to poop in the backyard like all the other filthy, shameless mongrels. This in-between space I now teeter in is ripe for some interesting observations, so I’ve decided to return to blogging, or as I like to call it, writing online. Most of my focus will be on the daily curiosities of Boston living from my perspective, the unavoidable sensationalism in news stories I find interesting, and maybe, if you’re good and do what I say, I’ll share with you some of the philosophical baggage I’ve picked up over the course of four years, giving you a taste of what issues, most vital to me, roll around in my head.