An Ode: College, Unemployment & Growing Up

My freshman year of college my suite mates and I shared our dorm with our floors RA.  She was awesome, an unusual quality for a resident assistant and took my roommate and me to our first college bar outing.  I was too shy (but later got over this hurdle) to really enjoy myself, plus Brittney lost my favorite sandals and puked on me.  That Christmas we decided to do Secret Santa and I gave my RA the children’s book “Everybody Poops”.

Four years later working at Barnes and Noble I came across this book again.  Everybody poops is a truism and is as factual as unemployment and the inescapability of growing up.  The one thing they have in common is that they’re all shitty.

If you’re a student like me you went to a school you liked and studied what you loved.  Your talents were nurtured and refined by professors who understood you, cared for you and vice versa.  Your idealist and somewhat liberal beliefs were true and at most time’s reality.  But the “real world” taught me that college is a mythical place you are allowed entrance into for so long and then you’ll be thrust out with your abundantly hope filled trunks and a fifty page thesis sticking to your shoes.  College will forget you as more kids pass through it but you unfortunately will never forget her.  College will always be, perhaps the biggest and best part of you and that is why growing up is so bitter sweet.

The thing is as you grow up you’re continually forced to settle.  Take any job to have money, any apartment to have a place to sleep.  Either way you struggle, struggle to pay your bills or be miserable in a job you hate.  There’s barely a transitional period for you to brace yourself.  Once you’re in the pit there’s hardly a way out.

A seminar on Karl Marx and grueling interview after interview taught me that we college graduates are a dime a dozen.  There will always be some other kid more desperate than you who will take the $20,000 salary even if their 130k education deserves more (and we do deserve more).

College forgets to teach you that only her professors will think the world of your 1^st prize short story fiction essay.  Only the bright, brimming world of academia will give a damn about your talent for iambic or your witty yet tragic protagonist.  However, on an interview they mean nothing and don’t teach you how to answer questions the right way or better yet how to lie properly.

Life after college seems bitter, doesn’t it?   For a few months it is but like any kind of uncomfortable pain it fades (some what slowly at times, like when you’re doing car bombs or keg stands and are reminded of those debaucheries you once did).  Growing up sucks but the inevitability of it is so, so… inevitable that the only thing you can do is deal with it, get a job and hopefully, like me, go to Grad school as soon as possible.