Last One (For Now)

There’s something about adult questions over college breaks that awakens my most vicious pent up scorn. The implications of questions about our plans for next week, year, and life are infuriating. Adults have this tedious capacity to make the present moment uninteresting and unimportant as compared to our preparation for future moments.

That could be why this ever-burgeoning amount of inquires about how many semesters of college I have left is so grating. How can college be, to use the word I always use with grownups, outstanding when I’m just supposed to be scheming my next move at all times?

But worrying is a two-lane expressway. The old ones wouldn’t piss us off so much if our significant choices were not weighing heavily. We despise thinking about careers, yet we often have a difficult time thinking about anything else.

Our preoccupation is so easy to read. It festers beneath all of our words, actions, and faces like a gurgling internal wound. It comes out in trips from all the various drugs, and trips to our academic advisors. It is the decision of who we will be.

It’s not tough to see why. The rearing process of our society is very much marked by the need to worry more. We have to learn that riding a bike around without a helmet can be as hazardous as drinking the chlorined water at the pool.

In school, we read moral fables. Do you remember one of those Aesop gems about the grasshopper and the ant? We are taught that the grasshopper deserves to starve in the winter because it wants to play and sing all summer. The ant survives the winter because it worries.

Yet, the lil values-transaction going on here leaves out what happens between the two-insects’ conversations. It doesn’t describe what the grasshopper does all summer, how much enjoyment he joyfully suckles from the Earth. And it certainly omits the monotonous existence of the ant. So, while one is going to live and the other die, the ant has chosen to worry so much about the future that the present is not worthwhile.

Similarly, all this confusion about our proper paths in life completely ignores the fact that we have so much working in our favor. Don’t you act like a coked-out maniac and tell me about the damn fluctuations of the job market! Not when college degrees give you the keys to the world, and history majors who had to wait tables in a way wish they still did. And especially not when the daily lessons of the independent life communicate new truths every day.

Now, I definitely don’t believe I’m the first person to realize this. I may have gotten it from Roadtrip Nation, the Graduate, conversations with the old ones, or psilosybin. No matter what, all it takes to enjoy the present is common sense.

I guess I’m trying to close this dwindling semester with what I think I’ve learned. I think I’m allowed this privilege in exchange for sneaking covertly into Halliburton recruitments and megachurches, attending time-consuming lectures, and doing my best to inhale the world.

I really just like to get conversations started. I was the type of kid who continually asked why until it could be established that there was no logical reason and the injustice of the world was fully established. So all this criminalizing of various people could simply be the result of my stubborn skull. Nonetheless, though, I just mean to slow the world down and share perspectives on issues that tear away the veneers of our day-to-day lives.

Continuing these columns next semester seems like a must at this point (next new one should be up Jan. 18), although nobody can predict what will happen. I do know that I have to practice if I want to be a writer. You can’t imagine how great writing a blog like this will look on my resume.