You Just Graduated? What Do We Have For Him Johnny??

I'll give you a hint: NOTHING.

  It hit me around 3pm today.  Normally the "it" is either an intense hunger pang, need to chug a diet coke or my fist to my face just to remind myself I'm alive. Today, however, that "it" was that exactly a year ago today I was drinking margaritas, sand in my nether regions with the only people I admit to liking and unbelievably happy. The kind of happy pychatrists try to capture in happy pills. Trust me.

I wrote an article the other day for work about Gypset fashion and using items from vacation in your home decor, which is funny because my last vacation just so happened to have been that vacation or "senior week" to the perpetually class Myrtle Beach, SC.  If I decorated my apartment with the things we brought back from Myrtle my roommates would be sitting in pink beach chairs and my window treatments would be chintzy dolphin towels.  I'm not embarrassed to admit that this was the best vacation of my life; it was the perfect culmination of the best four years I've had so far.  A time where you truly lived in the moment, where the decisions you made could easily be repealed and didn't stick with you past a semester.  Sure I have MANY moments that make me cringe (one or two from that week) but so do you.  When the week was over, graduation was over and then school was over I was like a heroin addict coming off a four year high.

I slept for a week straight, I sweat out alcohol for longer than I'd like to admit- I even gave up diet soda and ate only grilled chicken and brown rice not because it was bikini season but because I felt like I was going to DIE.  When that passed and I stopped scratching the paint off my walls there was suddenly this moment of extreme clarity the likes of which I'd never experienced.  I had no best friends to influence me, no torrid romance to preoccupy my mind and no papers to occupy my time.  I was stuck at home watching the Mets with my parents and going to bed sober, waking up not hung over.  And I was so f-ing scared and alone.  Now came the time to do something with my life.  Had all I really learned to do after four years was not choke on my own vomit?  Graduating was lonely for me, as for many of my friends.  Very few of us had found jobs and even when we did, even fewer left their homes.  Each month it got better, but each month felt like months, not like in college where a month seems like it's own calendar year.

Finally I moved out and moved on and the world instead of feeling so cut off suddenly felt so open. Too open. I felt like I had fallen in and it swallowed me up. I still feel like that. Shiz son, living is hard. Its, like, work. You're parents tell you that, but they are your parents and clearly you don't listen to them so its not till you are writing a massive rent check that is the equivalent of most people's electric bills that you realize... they were right.

{Actually a Gamma Phi Beta Chapter}

Its been a year and I don't feel like I've gotten very far but I feel like I have time, something we were always racing against at school.  When I go out its not a countdown to THE LAST TIME I EVER GO TO THIS BAR or THE LAST TIME I EVER GO OUT TO DINNER WITH MY FRIENDS.  As much as I miss college the only thing I really miss is being around my friends everyday.  Its scary discovering that you are finally figuring it out and recovering from always being on a HIGH HIGH and then a LOW LOW.  In no way shape or form did college really prepare me for the working world but then again the working world that our generation knows isn't like anything anyone has seen before. I'm thinking about the current crop of graduates and as much as I envied them in the beginning of this year, I wouldn't switch with them even if it meant going back to a club called "Spanish Gallion" and dancing in cages.

We have our own issues to deal with, but hopefully everyone has begun to figure themselves out just a wee bit more than back then.  There are still plenty of tables to dance on, we just get to do it in nicer shoes... and isn't that what its all about anyway?

{Sorry for all the words}