When I set out for North Carolina, the whole object was to be a functioning adult, a member of society. Previously, I had only been a member of a tiny, self-contained, often claustrophobic little society called college. But we all know that campus life doesn’t really prepare you for so-called “real life” as much as it prepares you for being, well, a college student.
The key difference? In college you’re spending money every day (or someone is) to attend classes, make friends, and, hopefully, to infuse yourself with a sense of direction if you can maintain the focus needed to do so. And the society you’re part of in college? Well, if you live on campus all four years, as I did, that society is a very skewed one, everything taken care of for you – you don’t need to cook, only show up at the caf(eteria); you don’t need to cut out a niche for yourself in the framework, just sign up for classes; you don’t need to clean up after yourself, just make sure you say hi and maybe thank you to the cleaning staff.
More than anything else, what excited me about graduation was to get away from all this, to stop studying the world and start living in it (okay, maybe not stop studying, but, ideally, do more than study). And this didn’t necessarily mean that I wanted to go out and make my mark on the world and wham-bang make my entrance. What was most exciting to me was the opportunity to pull my own weight, find my proverbial path all by myself like a big boy. In short, I just wanted to be a working stiff for a while. I’m not sure how universal this feeling is among college students, if at all, but it was a pretty strong one for me.
It’s almost as though, with each passing generation, we put off the responsibilities of adulthood just a little longer. Once upon a time you might have dropped out of high school to take over your parents’ farm and voilà, you’re a contributing member of society. Then it was finish high school and find yourself a trade while just a few select people went off to college. Eventually we got to the point where most kids are expected to go to college and graduate, while a few select people go on to grad school. This is an oversimplification, surely, but it seems to be a legitimate trend from where I’m standing. The phrase is “putting off the real world.”
A few weeks ago I watched Mike Rowe of “Dirty Jobs” fame on the TED website talk about how America is suffering because we’ve somehow come to believe that blue collar jobs are bad, and it made me think. It’s really worth watching and it’s quite hilarious (it involves Rowe’s epiphany as he sterilizes sheep with his teeth).
This is all, of course, not meant to bash anyone who is pursuing graduate school (I plan to myself, one day), and in this economy, putting off the real world is probably a wise move (if you’re going to make something of it).
Anyway, what all this preamble is supposed to be getting at is that, when I moved down here to NC, I was chomping at the bit to get going and be a cog in the machine for a little while, to feel like I earned what I owned. So when a jobs turned out to be mighty scarce here in Wilmington, I got to feeling pretty depressed. In a serious way. Here I was, paying rent out of a dwindling bank account while my parents footed the grocery bill. It was like college without the excuse/distraction of learning. Bluntly, I felt like shit.
But now the clouds have finally parted, and after a long, drawn-out process plus a string of false starts and not a few disappointments, not only have I landed a job, but one that I am ostensibly qualified to do as a German major. I’ve only been at the job a few days now and the German is a lesser component than I thought, but it’s 9-to-5 (or 7-to-3) and I feel like I have some purpose now in my day-to-day life. It just feels good to be employed, even if it is essentially a glorified tele-marketing job. It’s steady, it will pay the bills, and that’s a lot more than a lot of people can claim just now. A job always seemed like an eventuality or an inevitability (which it may be?), and I didn’t realize how badly I wanted/needed one until I couldn’t get one.
I’ll let you know when the optimism wears off.
