Slow Dancing in a Burning Room

Today I am having the epitome of a quarter life crisis, all because of one email from the Office of the Registrar informing me that I could search for classes. As a graduate student I now have first pick of the classes, and can arrange my schedule to best fit me.

Except that is a complete and utter lie, since there is only one class that I can actually take in my program; tech writing, perhaps the one class I wanted to avoid the most. There are however, over ten that I could take in the Politics program. You know, that field I actually got my degree in, am actually interested in, and was actually pretty good at?

Perhaps I should start at the beginning. In the last year I've rediscovered my love of writing. I was on the newspaper all through high school, and while in college I legitimately enjoyed writing papers. I love arguing and making a point, and since my Politics and International Relations degree wasn't getting me employed in this economy, I thought I needed to switch things up a bit. Perhaps I could combine my interest in politics with a love of writing, but first I felt like I needed the piece of paper to prove that people could hire me. Visions of writing/editing for the Council of Foreign Relations danced in my head, and gleefully I sought out a program to help me get there. Journalism seemed too broad, communications made me nauseous, and then I saw that my old/local university offered a Professional Writing and Editing program. It would take a year to complete, not cost an arm and a leg (just a few fingers and toes) and I would have a piece of paper saying HIRE ME.

But then I got a job. And then it was time to register for classes. And then said job said, "We can't work with you, your schedule is 8-5 and we can't arrange for anyone to cover you to leave early for class. You need to decide what your priorities are." Right, because I'm going to choose a receptionist job over a master's program.

Except I did.

I did the "Responsible" thing, and put economic security ahead of completing my degree within a year. So perhaps it was after a three week hissy fit in which I was determined to quit and pursue my hazy, still unformed dreams. I didn't though, I scheduled the only two 7:30 classes that even remotely fit my requirements. So the semester started, I was very excited to start back at school, to learn, to read, to write again. To fall head first back into my nerdy habits of loving school.

Except I didn't.

I have fun in my blogging class, it forces me to write, and moreover it's provided me an outlet to work everything out in my head. Or at the least to accept that maybe I just have to ride it out. But my other class? It's everything I hate about academics. I haven't learned anything, I dread the class, I find it unbearably boring and even worse is it has forced me to question whether this program will actually benefit me in any way. I'm not learning to be a better writer or editor, I'm being trained to enter the academic field of rhetoric. Which let me tell you, is resoundingly not my cup of tea. If I was going to pursue a useless academic field, I would be rotting away at some tiny liberal arts school, up to my eyeballs in classical and modern philosophy texts. Instead I'm stuck for three hours a week debating the power of the technical writers, excuse me, "technical communicators." One class I finally broke down and started talking about real responsibility hierarchies in the form of the ICC and ICJ. My classmates stared blankly at me, and I went back to hiding in the corner, trying to grasp why any of this mattered.

Which was fine. If you haven't noticed, pondering irrelevant matters with no real answers is kind of my forte.

But now I have to actually find an answer. About where I'm going, what I want to do, and if I should really keep pursuing this degree, or if I should stay at the job I have. Big questions for 9 a.m.on a Friday.

Do I prolong this program even longer, and only take the one class that I don't want to take just so I can still be doing my masters? So that I can feel like I'm working toward something instead of standing still? Do I even want to stay in this program with no guarantee that I will come out with the ability to get a writing/editing job at the end of it? Or do I eat this semester's tuition money, and just switch back into Politics, into the realm of power struggles that have tangible relations to the world around us? Would any master's degree work?
Will I ever learn to write without using the Socratic method?

What about my job?(The answer is apparently not.) Do I stay at a place that refuses to work with me in any capacity? Or with a boss who micromanages my every twitch? Just today she came and reorganized my desk. A few months ago she pulled me into a one-on-one about young professionalism because I had lowered my chair since it made me hunch over the desk at that height. A thirty minute lecture because I was trying to stop my back from hurting and my neck from cramping. She told a group of people going to lunch yesterday, and who had invited me to come along, that she supposed just this once she could "grant permission" to let me go to a slightly longer than 60 minute lunch (everyone else in the office takes close to two hours). She promised to call me and let me know I had been invited, and yet for some reason my phone registered no new or missed calls. I can't go use the restroom and leave the calls on voicemail without being paranoid about being lectured. It's like a nit-picking form of guerrilla warfare and it keeps me on edge all day.

But who quits over the simple fact that their boss is a pain in the ass? I have no guarantee that I would be able to get another job, nonetheless one that allows me enough spare time to work on homework, and has a 40 minutes or under commuting time. Honestly I don't know if I have the wherewithal to have my ego bruised quite as soundly as it was in the last year of searching for jobs. Having everything you've worked for, all your good grades and gold stars be deemed irrelevant is daunting.

So now I'm at a crossroads again, with my job and my education going in two different directions, and I have to choose between them again. And I'm not even sure if either of them is worth choosing.

Or I could just yell at the English Department. Would it really kill them to offer more 7:20 classes? I know by nature of studying English or Philosophy, we have to resign ourselves to choosing our cardboard hobo box early on, but stop crushing the dreams so early. Let us enjoy a little fiscal stability at least until graduation...

I know You are but What am I?

This week I'm switching things up a bit, and letting someone else take the helm. After all, my whole reason for starting this blog was to relate my own experiences as a new college graduate with others experiencing the same thing. For my first guest blog, I asked an old friend of mine who I've known since early high school, but who haled from that other coast on the west. He went to a small liberal arts college, majored in politics, and scared the hell out of me while he studied abroad in Israel. He has since defected to the good coast (though he'd argue otherwise), and has been kind enough to take a moment to step back from his job and his ocd compulsion toward following the news, and give a brief interlude into his own thoughts.

So without further ado, I present Kevin, author of the blog, "The Partisan,"(http://www.partisansblog.blogspot.com/):

Pragmatism vs. Idealism While Coming of Age in an Era of Pragmatism vs. Idealism.

2008 was supposedly the year of hope and change. Politicians clambered onto the bandwagon for fear of falling off the face of the earth if they couldn’t adequately harness discontentment with the outgoing administration and genuine unease regarding the status quo. It was determined that nearly every aspect of industry and infrastructure needed sweeping reform and repair, and that such reform would be undertaken with new resolve and a new sense of unity.

2009, of course, has shown itself to be the year of running up the deficit like it’s going out of style (which clearly it isn’t) and/or shouting surreal incomplete sentences at town hall meeting after town hall meeting after Presidential address before Congress. Reform efforts have stalled or been forgotten. The newly-minted age of “post-partisanship” lasted half a year at best, unceremoniously smothered by ill-conceived Nazi comparisons and members of the House of Representatives formally voting to ‘express disapproval’ with one another.

A sizeable chunk of my undergraduate experience consisted of applying all things sociopolitical and socioeconomic to the beloved ‘pragmatism versus idealism’ dichotomy. Granted, at the time I cared more about passing required courses than arriving at earth-shattering realizations about the world. It also all largely took place in the freakishly homogeneous confines of a small, well-off liberal arts college (albeit in hapless Michigan). I learned to view the world’s various goings on through those goggles, nonetheless. I would consider myself to be rather idealistic, but I’ve worked to remain grounded in reality in such a way as to keep myself reasonable. Perhaps forever in conflict with the sliding scale.

So it was with great confusion that my various utopian dreams and cynical rebuttals followed me out of school in 2007 -- as happens for class after class, year after year -- and headlong into the much-vaunted ‘real world’ from which there was no escape. I arrived in a land in which jobs no longer served the purpose of occupying oneself during summer vacation (R.I.P.), and set about paying the bills.

A year or so passed, and I found myself in the aforementioned world of hope and optimism versus, at least in part, the straightforward fear of not being able to make ends meet. Like so many of my peers, I grappled with working to be an agent for positive change in the world or working until it was simply time to clock out and go home. To date, I still fall into the latter category, left to wonder whether or not to take a risk for something in which I believe and how big that risk could or should be. I question whether or not it’s even worth investing energy and emotion into a world increasingly dominated by all manner of unproductive and bitter politicking.

Then I remember that I always wanted to work for something other than mere financial stability and accomplish something greater than the bare minimum, and I arrive back at square one, left to struggle with conflicting thoughts until it’s time to get up and go back to work.

Make me a Shadowboxer baby...

I'm currently reading the book The Magicians, and there's a line in it that I had to share, because it really encapsulates how I sometimes feel about blogging. It's a form of narcissism, believing my thoughts and opinions, the trivialities of my life are somehow so important that others should read about it. In a sense, writing is a self-indulgence, the feeling of a thought bursting out from you with a dire need to be put into words and be shared with others. It can be an almost violent effect, this desire to relate and be heard, and yet we hide behind words on a page. We don't have to face the immediate response of those who read it, and in some ways it makes us more honest.

Other times, it might be healthier to force it out into reality of our day to day lives.

This quote, in a book that deals with magic and does not coexist in the realm of the internet at all, manages to poke fun at it just a little bit.It takes that need to express ourselves in some fashion and narrows it down to its lowest common denominator.

"Are you kidding? That guy was a mystery wrapped in an enigma and crudely stapled to a ticking fucking time bomb. He was either going to hit someone or start a blog. To tell you the truth I'm kind of glad he hit you."

Sitting on the Dock of the Bay Watching the Tides Roll Away...

It is a true and undeniable fact that once a week a large chunk of my paycheck will fleetingly exchange itself into bounded paper form. I don't know how to quit Borders. I'm like a junkie whose skin is crawling for the smell of paper, and even if I haven't finished my latest batch of books, I'm back trawling for more.

Yet there is another true fact about these excursions.

I can rarely find something even remotely relatable.

But that is another story, because for once I did find a book, and it just so happened to be about twentysomethings. It's called the The Last Summer (of You & Me) by Ann Brashares, who also wrote the Sister of the Traveling Pants series (that I never had an inkling to read). In her debut adult novel, she graduated with her adolescents and moved into young adults. The cover caught my eye, as it has two sisters plopped on a shoreline, and the blurbs all spoke about it being a coming of age tale and a great beach read. Well I've come of age and I'd rather be at the beach, so into my book stash it went.

And I read it. Amazingly enough I liked it. I even had a few euphoria moments of, "I can relate to this!" So like anyone from the internet obsessed generation, I'd figure I'd blog about it. Now despite the fact that I'm getting my master's in English, I'm not an English major, so this is not a literary review. There will be plot spoilers and will largely be focused on the author's handling of people on the verge of the beginning of their lives, and struggling with that new identity. Therefore if you want to be surprised, cease your reading now.

The Last Summer (of You & Me) is primarily about two sisters, Alice 21, Riley 24, and their lifelong friend Paul who is also 24. Every summer they've escaped to their family beach houses on Fire Island, a mere ferry's ride from their homes in Manhattan. Riley is the intrepid outdoorsy type whose dyslexia kept her from being the brains of the family, so she spends her summers being a life guard and her winters leading outdoor adventure groups. Alice is the classic overachieving younger sister who happens to be smarter, prettier, and desperately scared of usurping her much adored older sister. She over thinks and analyzes, and is terrified of both being left and leaving behind her sister. Then comes Paul. Best friend. Love Interest. Lost Soul. Classic Rich Bad Boy with an Attitude. He's got issues, no one understands him, Riley's his closest friend because she's his partner in crime, and more importantly she doesn't make him deal with his crap. He's also tragically in love with Alice, as she is with him, and yet neither will do anything about it out of fear. The book centers around their last summer, as they must face the decision of remaining static or growing up.

How's that for vague? I knew I couldn't write a real review, so in short it is the author's attempts at a grown up version of Peter Pan. Everything comes down to growing up and moving on, or dying. No literally. Riley, who remains a kind of perpetual child, doesn't have relationships, go to college, or have a 'real job,' dies. And you smell it coming from almost the first chapter. The author even begins with a J.M. Barrie quote, ""No one ever gets over the first unfairness; no one except Peter. He often met it, but he always forgot it. I suppose that was the real difference between him and all the rest." Once you realize that Riley is the girl who can't grow up, you see Alice and Paul in a strange dichotomy of supporting roles, while still being the main characters. It is like reading Peter Pan from the perspective of the Lost Boys. You see how much they are held back and limited by the aura of Peter Pen that draws them in to the world of just pretend. Riley, while no means as magnanimous a character, let's go of the past and ignores the future, and is content to stay exclusively within the confines of the latest adventure. No rock face is too steep nor wave too rough, and while she's fiercely loyal to Alice and Paul, she has no sense of neediness that the other two exude. While she stands still, the others are forced to avert their eyes and slow their pace so as not to surpass her. She doesn't fight against growing up, as Peter Pan did, she simply doesn't think of it. So clearly she dies.

Alice and Paul however, are the two who are actually grappling with the issue of being twentysomethings. Paul returns to Fire Island after two summers away, as jaded and desperate to belong as ever. He loves Alice. He hates Alice. He wants Alice. He wants to push her away. At every turn he is a mass of contradictions, terrified of reaching out to take what he wants from life. Everything about him is open ended. His family is absurdly wealthy, and his grandparents are fighting tooth and nail with his flake of a mother to secure his inheritance from his dead father. Therefore he hates money. He has all but a final philosophy paper to finish in order to close out his undergraduate degree, and he writes six pages every night, and then erases four. He has returned from California after failing to start an uprising among the low wage migrant field workers. He is a man-boy constantly on the cusp, and fighting it at every turn. Shockingly, he gives in, ravishes the girl, loses the girl when her sister is dying, and turns into a bitter schmuck convinced that all his bitterness was justified.

Alice is the care taker, who feels too much for those around her. Their hurt becomes hers, and despite her Ivy League law school acceptance, her inherently likability, and bright future, she willingly holds herself back to attempt to catch up with the older two. Perhaps with this character do we truly see the twentysomething struggle, as she has to define herself within her own terms, outside of her sister, and even away from Paul. All her life she had tried not to outshine her sister. She let Paul's snide remarks make her doubt her faith, her values, her life choices, even so muc as her love for him. Despite being the youngest of the three characters, she is clearly the most mature, and she is the one who makes the effort to seize the relationship she wants. And in the tradition of most literature, upon finding happiness, it is of course shattered by tragedy. The author's teen-lit background comes to the forefront, as Alice punishes herself for making love with Paul as Riley was falling ill. They are then kept apart through secrets and miscommunication, which you're well aware will work themselves out in the end.

Yet the meat of the book, comes during the fall, winter, and spring of Riley's illness. She is diagnosed with a heart disease that puts her on a transplant list, that never comes through. Here is this vital girl who lives in perpetual summer who is suddenly suffocating in holed up apartment with her parents. Alice is forced to watch as disease clips Peter Pan's proverbial wings; Riley gives up hope and has no use for a life of weakness. She refuses to tell Paul or submit to the humiliation of once again being her parent's child. Alice, as ever unable to move past Riley, moves home, defers law school, gives up Paul, and takes a job on the Central Park maintenance team, and in a hole in the wall drugstore. Every day her light dims, soon to be diminished alongside Riley. She is the healthy child living at home again, trying to maintain her independence and yet abide by the house rules. It is in this passage, that I think the experience is best captured:

"At one time, years before, Alice and Riley had made a big hole in the ceiling of their family's life and climbed out of it. Riley had enrolled in NOLS. She had spent an entire month of January in a hole in the snow. Alice had gone to college. Both of them had lived different places and met people. They'd cooked their food and washed their clothes- Riley mostly washing them in puddles in the backcountry, and Alice never separating dark from light. And now they were both back home. How quickly the hole in the ceiling grew back over their heads without even a scar to let you know it had once been open there. Healing wasn't always the best thing. Sometimes a hole was better left open. Sometimes it healed too thick and too well and left separate pieces fused and incompetent. And it was harder to reopen after that."
(pp.170-171)

How does a grown child fit their way back inside the nest they'd already left? The bed they'd outgrown, the curfews they'd dismissed, and the responsibilities they'd undertook as they'd set out on their own. More importantly, how do they ever find a way to leave it again? After the initial squeezing and jostling to fit through a jagged hole, the ease and comfort settles upon them. Big decisions can be made by someone else, meals are provided, and the terrifying real world can be put off for a little while longer. Alice settles into this routine, never thinking of or for herself as she wastes away in thankless jobs, ignoring her expensive BA from a private college. The whole world becomes a possibility when you never make the decision to step into it.

Ultimately Riley dies, slipping away without consequence while Alice works a late shift, proving that even if you stand still, the world does not. Paul sells his beach house when Alice leaves him behind, and Alice's parents choose to sell theirs now that Riley has passed. It is the end of the book, and the last summer in Neverland while Alice closes up the house. New children have moved next door, flocking to her while she prolongs her stay. She revels in the sweet innocence of childhood and teaching the next generation the tricks of island life. Predictably Paul comes and slowly they heal together in the last weekend of the summer. Without the anchor of Riley holding them back, they can leave Neverland and grow up, so hand in hand they take the last ferry of the season back to Manhattan.

The novel's ending is predictably bittersweet, as the couple gets their long awaited happily ever after. Alice has forsaken law school and is going into social work, moving out of her crappy jobs and doing something good in the world. Paul is doing grad school in Manhattan as well, and it is implied that soon they will live together, marry, and repeat the cycle of all those before them. Yet I find myself wondering if they're the ones who really won. Riley may be dead, but her ashes were thrown into the waves, to forever float among the dolphins. She may not be connected to the 'real world,' but she also won't face the mire of reality that weighed down their parents. Yes, we all must grow up and plug ourselves into the world, but must it come at the cost of everything we cherished as children? For Paul, he doubted that his love for Alice could follow him into adulthood, and it did, and he can carry it with him always. Still though, this implies that only that which can change with us can move with us throughout life. Sisterhood pacts and the beach houses that contain them must be left behind. Alice perhaps summarizes it best with one of the final passages of the book:

"So often this summer I keep thinking: I know I'm holding back. I know I'm waiting. I know I'm afraid to go forward. But I don't know how to get there from here.'... 'Sometimes I see it as a tricky mountain pass between two valleys. Other times, it's like perilous straits connecting two lands.
Partly it's the fear of the trip itself, I think, but partly it's the fear that I won't be able to get back. I'll turn around and the clouds will have settled over the mountaintop. Or the waters will have risen and shifted, there will be no way home.'....'But that's not even the real fear.'...'The real fear is that I won't want to go home.'" (p.291)

Growing up isn't just leaving home. It's Orpheus marching out of Hades and not looking back this time no matter how great the temptation. He had Eurydice by the hand, and he was taking the only thing that mattered with him. That was Paul and Alice on the last Ferry, in the last weekend, of the last summer of their childhood; moving forward with the only thing that mattered.

Because if you keep looking back and don't grow up, you get left behind.

Or you know.

You die.

But the World Don't Need Scholars as Much as I Thought..

I just came across this article from 2004 from the USA TODAY http://www.usatoday.com/life/lifestyle/2004-09-30-extended-adolescence_x.htm and it almost entirely contradicts everything I said in my previous post. Now I don't mean to imply that I'm making a retraction, four couples in my immediate friend group getting married at the age of 23/24 makes my point valid. However, the article, "It's Time to Grow Up- Later," discusses twentysomethings as highly educated layabouts who put off marriage, careers, and fiscal responsibility. All of five years ago, in "trying fiscal times" (apparently I missed that suffering memo in 2004) twentysomethings were engaging in the gap period between adolescence and adulthood in an effort to not enter into a life they would later regret. The now pushing 30 year olds were fleeing off to far off lands to teach and more or less engage in an idealistic walkabout that prolonged office work and matrimony as long as possible. In my head, I'm picturing a bunch of college grads trading in their Abercrombie wardrobes and heading off in search of meaning, (Ipods still firmly in their ears) while living in a hut in some country whose name I cannot pronounce. Worldly possessions left in the keeping of mom and dad, who support their idealism, or if they're my father, wondering why he spent hordes of money on private schools, study abroad progams, and a college education.


Ok, so I'm stereotyping. And probably from the 90s with flannel shirts, Timberland knock off boots, dreads, and body odor....and a crappy van for cross country trips, a lot of hemp, and incense. Or perhaps I'm just thinking of my aunt who spent her 20s that way. All in all, I'm not feeling that this is overly representative of where we are now. Yes I can log into facebook and pick probably 20 kids off my friends list who have traveled to distant lands to teach English or minister to the sick, but to a letter all of them are doing missionary work in the process, and/or it's a part of their graduate studies programs.


This in fact leads me to what I think my point is about this article, it generally categorizes us as irresponsible idealists who are demanding to be coddled well into our twenties. Now as a 24 year old who is coddled and spoiled by mom and dad, I have to admit to a hypocrisy here. I pay my car insurance, student loans, gas, phone bill and tuition, but I do live and eat for free, which is apparently falling into one of their stereotypes. Yes, I am "saving money," but it's also really damn nice to come home from work and eat mom's cooking. However, I'm in the minority. Most of my friends are apartment dwellers, engaged, working in an office in a field not of their choice, and doing what has to be done to make ends meet. Are they debating grad school and/or in it? Yes, but in this economy it's nearly mandatory. What hope does someone with a bachelor's degree have for competing against a master's candidate and/or ten years experience? They end up doing white collar grunt work and hating their lives, but the fact of the matter is they're doing what has to be done and being responsible.

And isn't that what being an adult is about?

Taking responsibility?

Hating your life?

Going to bed at 10:30?

Talking about your job at weddings?

Not smelling bad?