…College and all that that implies. Four years later, I am now a Bachelor of Arts in English with a minor in Psychology. I, too, now have the same advantage as millions of others who can probably use it better than I can.
On my search for a job, I've quickly discovered that it’s called a “degree” because that is the amount of difference it seems to make to prospective employers. Yes, while I had been studying bards and expatriate authors who drank excessively, lovely rhetorical ways of dealing with the problem of evil, and writing personal anecdotes with the names changed for creative writing classes, other people were out there doing actual work.
When I graduated, I knew it would take time until I could get on my own two feet. Getting a job is not so easy, I told myself. It takes time. In this economy, it could take months. All I need is tenacity and patience, I said. It’ll come.
It took three days for the panic to set in. It must have set in sometime overnight while I slept because it was poised and ready for me as soon as my eyes opened that one morning.
It began first with the caution: not to let myself get lazy or else I’ll blink and suddenly be forty-five and still waking up to this very ceiling. There’ll a knock on this very bedroom door as I watch late morning court shows—it’s my mother asking me if I’d like a grilled cheese sandwich for lunch, and I would, but I say no because, I mutter, I can get it myself, damn it, but I don’t because I'm lazy, and now—DAMN IT—I’ve missed the verdict of the last case.
Alright, I know that doesn’t happen over a single blink; it would happen over the course of many. But the memories you get out of a life spent doing nothing but blinking indifferently are scrapped by the brain to make room for something more useful, such as trivia about obscure movies and music that aren't very good, but very obscure and that's almost as good. And I’d know more about these boring things than my forty-five years here on earth should have allowed, not realizing the reason for this is that I’d done nothing at all with my forty-five years here on earth. And then the trivia’s all I’d ever talk about, and I would have no friends who talked about other things, and I would never marry.
I’ve already decided I will not marry, but I don’t want people’s silent response to be “Well, of course you won’t,” and then they’d look at me as if I’d said I decided to cooperate with the laws of physics, but on my own terms.
Here are three things I can tell you about me that set up the basis of this whole thing. Think of this as the theme song of The Boring Flux, without any of that music you always hear about.
1. I am a writer of prose and poetry. No, not a writer you’ve ever heard of.
2. I have the rest of my life ahead of me, skulking around in the shadows and chortling at me.
3. I am scared shitless.
Human possibility is something that fascinates me. That’s why I’ve started this, this sort of study. I’m watching myself and others like me, in my situation.
I’m aware, in a very literal sense of that word, that there are almost limitless possibilities of what I can do with my life, even if I can't reconcile that idea with the number of job applications I've so far sent out to the slaughter. This study could be a learning experience for me, depending on if I actually think up a concrete thesis or reason for doing any of this.
But I leave you with this afterthought: Throughout the course of this study, whether you learn something from me or not, come to look up to me, or down on me, just know that I apologize in advance if this all winds up very depressing.
