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Advice to a Pre-Grad Me
5 AugFirst of all, mourn the loss of college. Within the first 5 days of walking across stage and accepting your diploma, you are going to start feeling a sinking pit of despair in your gut. You are going to mistake this feeling for full on depression, polio, or gas, but it’s none; it’s a loss. The sooner you begin the stages of grieving the sooner you are going to start feeling better.
There will be days when the only physical social interaction you have will be with the barista at Starbucks or the high school girl taking your drive-thru order at Taco Bell. Try not to let this get to you and strike up a conversation about the Norah Jones album next to the cash register or just flash a smile and see if you can get extra mild sauce for your solo dining experience.
Do not let yourself have too much free time. For the love of God, please, please do not let yourself have too much free time. In these periods is when you will honestly feel that you are depressed/lonely/crazy. You will access your HBO On Demand service and the next thing you know it’s gone from Saturday morning to Wednesday at noon and you’re surrounded by jars of your own urine and 4 seasons of Entourage now show the taunting check mark of “watched”.
If you’re going to spend money you don’t have, only do so if going out with friends. Go to 24 Diner and get the milkshake and macaroni & cheese, try a new drink on Rainy Street, enjoy the company of friends and work on your conversational skills with strangers. Avoid going to Target and convincing yourself that you need the deluxe Blu-ray version of Downton Abbey, YOU DON’T; it’s going to be on Netflix within a week anyways.
Get a job.
It’s okay if you have to move back in with your parents. When you make the tough choice go to your bathroom and quietly sob while listening to Arcade Fire’s Funeral. Try and think of the positives: you have parents who are willing to take you back when, legally, you’re not their problem anymore; free food; this is your chance to save up money so that you can stand on your own two feet, or buy that plane ticket to Seattle; free food; you have your dogs unyielding love back in your life; free food.
Force yourself on people at work. Not sexually, but charismatically! Put on the robes of a clown and try to charm everyone you see. There will be moments where you can see people getting annoyed at the fact that you are cheerful at work, but if you are happy you will attract people who are happy as well and that will bring you that much closer to your life being Friends/Happy Endings/How I Met Your Mother/ Degrassi: Adult Lyfe Iz Hard!
When Jay Z’s management team asks you to get a 4X12 white candle from the West Elm 11 blocks away, DO NOT make the incredibly stupid mistake of thinking “linen” or “snow” is the same thing as white. THEY. ARE. NOT. White is specifically white in their eyes, and if you mistake this you will be greeted with a prompt, “you’re pathetic,” at the freight elevator.
When you look at Facebook and think to yourself that everyone but you has it together, shut it down. Log out and get on Tumblr where strangers with funny gifs will ease your anxiety. And try to take in solace that what you are reading on Facebook is 97% the peak of their day. So screw them when they get a job offer in San Diego or post pictures from that Kelly Clarkson concert that you had no interest in going to.
This is one of the hardest ones. When it seems like every single freaking person you know is getting engaged, be happy for him or her. Don’t let their decision define you as “permanently single and unable to have a serious relationship,” remember that you were raised in the Carrie Bradshaw generation where being single past 21 is incredibly socially accepted and that they are the exception to the rule, not you. And if all else fails convince others and yourself that your father didn’t settle down until he was 40 and that you are destined to follow in his footsteps.
Sneaking Whole Foods cheddar biscuits into a matinee showing of Rock of Ages can be a little exhilarating and count as your rebellious stage.
Go on dates and don’t let the nervousness of putting yourself out there be intimidating. Just because a third of your friend group found their mate at a campus ministry doesn’t mean you had to. Find single friends that want to be fun and adventurous and play the game of “out of all these customers at Panera Bread, whom would you screw?”
See The Dark Knight Rises twice and listen, watch, and truly take in Batman’s message: do not let fear define or cripple you. You’re in your twenties and having it all together by next week is not an option. Don’t let the anxiety of life get you so terrified that you want to stay hidden in the bottom drawer of your dresser for a week, or just go back to your urine-jar-filled room and pretend that you’re safe with Turtle, E, and the gang. The hardest step is the first, and SPOILERS if Batman can escape the 6-mile radius of an atom bomb in less than a minute, you can surely make it through brunch.
When you are offered a 2-week gig in Nashville as an assistant for a cooking show, take it – even though you’re going to have full-blown panic attacks that last the entire duration of your 15-hour drive there and a near death experience at an Arkansas McDonald’s. This gig is not going to change your future in the way that you hope for it to, but you will have some fun stories at the end of each day and will have challenged yourself in ways you never thought possible. You’re also going to get to crash on the bedroom floor of your best friends new house and be there for the next steps of her incredible journey. This will help you regain a sense of the collegiate normality you feared was lost after you took those steps across the stage, and in this time of your life normality is what you need most.
Oh, and while grabbing for a large mirror to move out of a shot you will instead grab the boob of a 53-year-old German woman who will simply wink at you letting you know that both you and everything is all right.
The Perfection of Trying
6 JunIf you’ve noticed at all, the last post I wrote was dated as March 5th. There are many things that I could blame for the lack of writings: I’ve been working at internships! I’ve been volunteering at festivals! I’ve been having a social life! I’ve been watching Dance Moms on a constant loop! But I know what the true reason is: the first sentence.
I’m the type of person where I want everything to be perfect the first time around. I don’t care if it’s giving a speech in class, creating documents at work, changing a tire – please, when have I ever changed a tire? – or writing a meaningless blog post that fewer people will read than watch Hart of Dixie on CW. I need to feel that the product I put out was as mint conditionally perfect as all hell.
I crave perfection in my own life because I view others as being perfect. I’m a product of raising myself on the ridiculous nighttime soaps of The OC, Degrassi, and Desperate Housewives where, even though there were problems, everyone seemed perfect. I always thought I had a critical eye for television and could distinguish between fantasy and reality, but when the reality of my life is friends getting married at 21 and fellow post grads signing high five-figure deals at big shot companies, when does the finite line of my reality get snatched in the night and exchanged with a changeling of fantasy? For me, the reality is that I am currently 22-years-old, single, broke, and still interning. The bulk of my days I am grateful that this is my life, but there are the slim hours where I feel like everyone else has it together and maybe I should stop striving for the perfection I want and settle for the perfection that seems obtainable e.g. trophy wife and beef jerky outlet owner.
What I’m trying to get at is that the first sentence of each of these posts is a metaphor for the perfection I want to obtain. If I can lure these suckers in with a great blog post, I can trick them into thinking I have it together! I can fool them into believing my life is perfect; that I’m perfect! And maybe, just maybe, I can feel like I have some sense of perfection to latch onto.
While I realize the perfection I want to obtain may happen later in life or maybe never at all, I need to still try. I need to type out that first sentence, flaws and all, to know that I have mastered the perfection of trying.
What I Want From My Twenties
23 FebI’ve mentioned it once and I will most likely mention it again just because it seems to be the only thought that my mind is able to latch onto: I’m at the point in my life where I have to worry about “having it all.”
What exactly is “it all,” though? The textbook definition – that I have always viewed as the correct answer – is the career, the spouse, the kids, the house. The checklist is so unnecessarily and relentlessly forced upon twenty-somethings that we begin to believe that this grocery list is what will define our future as valuable and worthy. While I definitely think that I want all of the list someday, right now I want to be in my twenties and not worry about what my place in the world will be in the next 20+ years.
In the movie The Help, there is a scene where Aibileen opens up to Skeeter about her son’s death. She mentions that she grieves not only for the loss of a son, but because her son was in the prime of his life upon his passing: his twenties. She says that that time is the best part of someone’s life. That they are just beginning in the world. What ‘ol Abbie speaks is the truth, but sometimes we lose sight of that when our vision is so skewed to the neon sign blinking “FUTURE” on the left.
So this is a post where I’m not going to worry about what 30’s and 40’s-ville holds for me, but rather what I want to put on the grocery list of my twenties.
I want to party it up
I want to grow in my relationship with Christ
I want cool, artsy, hipstery photos of myself to be taken everyday
I want to talk about Jesus everyday
I want to backpack to Alaska
I want to move to New York City
I want to be athletic and outdoorsy
I want the community I gained in college to continue
I want to have brunch as often as possible
I want to spend money frivolously
I want to worry about how I’m going to pay my bills
I want the hole-in-the-wall apartment in the city that I will cry about every night
I want the body that I’ve always wanted
I want the committed relationship that I’ve always wanted
I want to struggle
I want things to come easy
I want a mentor
I want to go to as many concerts and shows as I possibly can
I want to meet Adele
I want to go to Comic-Con
I want to talk about TV everyday
I want to own a welsh corgi
I want to meet a penguin or beluga whale
I want to learn mandolin
I want to be “discovered” for something
I want to go on random adventures
I want to enter to be a contestant on The Real World
I want the “what the hell did I just do?” moments
I want to say “you owe me big time for that!”
I want to laugh so much that it hurts
I want my friends to be famous
I want to get into a fistfight
I want to grow my hair long and then chop it all off
I want to feel pride in myself for something I’ve done or achieved
I want a goal to work towards
I want to be sad
I want to be happy
I want love
I want comments on this blog
Cheers, y’all.
Making The Transition From Student to Post Grad
21 FebThe past couple of months have been a time of transition. Not only a time of relocation transition (I moved 30 minutes up the road), but also a time of mental transition. For the past 13 + years of my life all I have ever known is wake up, go to school, come home, study as much as one can, rinse and repeat. Now that I am in the abyss of what is known as the post grad world, this routine has suddenly rendered itself obsolete. What’s a boy to do? I don’t know. You tell me.
I remember the feelings I felt the first few months of college my freshmen year crystal clearly. The campus was intimidating, the classes were intimidating, the people were intimidating, even my less-than-2-months-I-can’t-deal-with-this roommate who I woke up one morning to find plastering his face with makeup was intimidating. I remember all the bad and feelings of inadequacy like it was yesterday. Waking up each morning, following my programmed routine and yet feeling like something was missing. Something was off. But what was it?
Once I met “The Family” – as my group of friends liked to call ourselves – all of those feelings of depression, anxiety, inadequacy, and being lost were thrown out of the 7th story window of my new dorm room and hastily replaced with rainbows, butterfly’s, and Build-A-Bear stuffed penguins. I guess human connection is what makes a person thrive.
Well, the dreaded feelings that were purged nearly 4 years ago have returned now that I’ve graduated college and entered into my freshmen year of “real life.” I have a new routine: wake up, go to my internship if it’s the appropriate day when I’m supposed to go, and then come home. It’s an incredibly simple schedule to master, but it’s missing the hidden factor that my old routine had crammed into the middle of rinse and repeat: friends.
I believe that the hardest transition from student to post grad is the loss of connection, unity, and family that college life contains. In college, you are surrounded by thousands and thousands of people your own age. You can pick and choose whom you want to befriend and whom you don’t want to befriend because you have the option to. Once moving to a new city and starting a new life, it’s easy to feel distant and sad because you are no longer in constant communication with your favorite people in the world. Now the type of connection you yearn to receive is either a simple chat at the water cooler, or living vicariously through the band of survivors on The Walking Dead. At least for me this is what I yearn for.
I still have the connections and love of my “old” friends, but in order to receive that, one of us has to make the 3o minute + time for traffic trek. And with the traffic in the city the way it is, it’s usually a $10 + drive round trip. Something I financially cannot do every single day. While I know that the limitation of my visiting with friends will be a good thing in the long run, this is the hardest transition for me. Finding a real job will come sooner or later, but the type of connection that I made with my friends in college will likely take a long time to – not replace, but – substitute.
So here is my question to all of you post grads out there on the internet scoping the Craigslist ads for job listings, what has been the hardest transition for you when it comes to moving out into the real world?
Why I Shouldn’t Be Ashamed For Watching The Real Housewives
7 FebOk, I should be.
As a male in society there are certain habits and behaviors that I’m supposed to partake in and be happy with: mowing the yard, watching football, drinking muscle milk, listening to Nickelback and Daughtry, and playing video games with little to no dialogue because men bond better through activities than conversation. Well, screw that.
While (after years of resentment) I find myself liking to mow the yard, I cannot truly attest to liking any of the latter. Muscle milk tastes like chalk, popular rock music sounds like the souls of a million welsh corgi puppies being dragged to Hades, video games frustrate me because I’m stubborn and want to win without a challenge, and football on TV is about as entertaining as watching The Tree of Life on mute, that is to say not. I really am a product of the aught age where the gender gap is beginning to narrow and androgyny is the new black. I enjoy building things with my hands and getting dirty, but I also enjoy shopping and long conversations about anything. While most men have come to embrace their feminine side (the Christian world is filled with them! Honestly, you would be insanely surprised), there is one thing that I only feel comfortable telling a select few female friends about: I am completely obsessed with the Housewives franchise.
(all of you, I’m sure)
There it is. The taboo statement has come out of the proverbial “only my thumbprint can access it” closet. I honestly do not know what it is about this franchise that keeps me tuning in, but I feel like it has to do with what Battlestar Galactica preached throughout the whole series: all of this has happened before and all of this will happen again.
Week after week, city after city, the housewives play that statement like chess, instigating their signature quip of “drama.” TNT thinks they know drama, psh, just watch New York City’s outing, then you’ll know drama. Words and insults are thrown like Chinese daggers, the ever-changing relationships and alliances could give the men of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy a run for their money, and the glamorous 1% world that, as Americans, we’re supposed to aspire to be like seems more like the playground harassment of elementary days past. So, as a man, why is this so utterly entertaining to me? Women fighting is the greatest thing in the world. By no means am I condoning physical violence. Verbal assault is where it’s at! When men fight, we throw a punch and it’s done. When women fight, it is catty, strategic, manipulating and oh so entertaining. Basically all the plot lines on Alias were derived from a meeting of dance moms.
When I watch the series I like to think of it as a collecting of data. I’m learning how to decipher women and understand them better. If I ask you to bring wine to my charity fundraiser, I need to clarify that I want you to bring the wine to be donated, not to drink yourself. If you decide that you want to be a pop star instead of a hospital nurse, I need to be supportive instead of attacking your credit as a singer. When you start your own shoe line of overpriced high heels, it would be the most evil thing in the world of me to make a pun on words about the brand name. And the most important advice I’ve learned, never throw someone out of your party for being rude, it’ll come back to haunt you 3 episodes and one trip to St. Bart’s later.
While my enjoyment of this show definitely discredits my manhood, I don’t really care. We live in a world where Glenn Close is being praised for her performance as a man in Albert Nodds, and there was a time where dudes had frosted tips. I thank the lord I was never one of them. And hey, I know plenty of men who watched Gilmore Girls for actual pleasure. Ok…it was one guy.
The Real Housewives of Orange County premieres tonight at 8pm on Bravo.
Scoring My Life: Part 2
3 FebEvery now and then the music gods that be grace the ears of we mere mortals with a song that is so perfectly perfect it can be used in any form or aspect of a television show or movie.
Art vs. Science’s “A.I.M. Fire” is that song for me right now.
Please tell me you can hear the magic of this song? Please!
The song is so much fun and has so much going on in it, that it can be paired with any scene – much like a fine Pinot gris…helloooo Ramona! The chanting of A.I.M. makes whatever you’re doing or watching seem like it is the most epic of epicness.
I’ve always been a big fan of when directors take a song that would seemingly not fit with the scene and then through the magic of film making, make you realize that no other song would have carried the same weight and tone. Tarantino has built a career on this. With the use of “Twisted Nerve,” the hospital scene in Kill Bill was taken to a whole new level of creepy and an iconic scene was born.
Anyways, seeing as how this is a scoring my life post, what life event would “A.I.M. Fire” connect with?
The go to obvious of this song would be to use it in a montage (I love montages) of my drunken nights out with friends. But, hey, I want to go for the unobvious. It could be used as subtle background music on a seemingly meaningless date, that when heightened ushers in a proposal! All of the restaurant starts clapping as a montage of our wedding begins to roll (again, I reaaaallly love montages). We could go for a conflict at work with a fellow colleague. And because of the silliness of the song, we go straight on Bride Wars and start pranking each other Jim Halpert style.
Scoring my life with this song is a little more difficult than I thought. I might just need to carry it around on a boombox with me until it finds the perfect time to appear.
So what do you think? “A.I.M. Fire” has become one of my favorite songs of the moment, ushering in play count after play count on my iTunes. But what do you think? Are you as big a fan of the song as I, or is it just another Foster The People wannabes that just doesn’t strike your fancy? Let me know in the comments below and also let me know what you are scoring your life to. Cheers.