The years immediately following the completion of your standard four year college education are undeniably bizarre. I’ve struggled with the gap between my lifestyle and the reality of not making very much money, grinding through a day job, and pouring my heart and soul into something that doesn’t always give much back. We all need distractions to get through our days. Here are my Top five post-graduate distractions.
5) The NFL
Football is a wonderful game. I really find the strategy of it beautiful. It’s also brutal, which is a lot of fun to watch. In addition, the coverage is endless. Everyone has something to say about every little detail. This means you can spend hours reading about whether or not Eli Manning should be considered an elite quarterback or how Rob Gronkowski got hammered after the Super Bowl and started taking off all of his friends’ shirts (true story). There is also fantasy football, which is great for working day jobs with internet access. Ultimately the NFL is something that really doesn’t matter at all but I assign it a tremendous amount of importance because of the distraction it provides. Other sports work too.
4) Start a Blog/website
The most important thing an education gives you is the ability to write. And if you’re like every other 23 year old that went to a liberal arts college, you probably have a lot to say about pretty much everything. So sign up for Wordpress and pretend that people care.
3) Online Dating
College was great. All you had to do was get a little drunk, go to a party and chances are that you would meet someone who was at least mildly interesting and attractive. Not the case afterwards. Graduating college is like becoming a freshman at bars. Everyone is about five years older than you and doesn’t care about the crappy blog you just started. So sign up for an online dating account and gawk at the other weirdos who are just as lost and bored as you are.
2) Read Fiction
Just because you’ve finished college doesn’t mean you need to stop reading. That novel everyone has been telling you about forever? Read it. Instead of looking at pictures of yourself on Facebook, escape into someone else’s imagination. Books with riveting narratives are particularly good for avoiding the fact that you’re twenty bucks short on rent this month.
1) Drinking
Beer, wine, whiskey, tequila. Pick your poison. Just get drunk and avoid your problems for a night, only to have them come crashing down in the chariot of the morning.
Sophia Fraioli ‘10
In August of 2010 I was on my way home from your typical post-graduate road trip. I had traveled across the country and I was flying back to Montclair, NJ the town where I grew up, back home with my parents.
To be honest, I had no expectation for what lay ahead of me. After a few failed job interviews in July (one where I was scolded for not wearing a pantsuit to the interview), the idea of getting a 9-5 seemed to be a far off dream. I had graduated college with a double major in Anthropology and Political Science, fields that I soon realized were not applicable in the real world, unless you wanted to become a professor or go to law school. Not to mention having a bachelor’s degree seemed obsolete, when ex-CEOs had started applying for entry-level jobs in our economic downturn.
I knew I wasn’t going to land an amazing full time job. So I ended up working for my aunt, archiving old scripts, and started to nanny down the street. I wasn’t thrilled, but I also wasn’t alone. It seemed like my whole high school class had come home and started the same life. We all would commiserate together at our local dive bar and return home at night to our childhood beds. We were slightly defeated, but still hopeful. I had no idea that in just a few short months my life would be taking a completely different turn with one simple idea over a soup and salad combo at Panera Bread.
We have a million great ideas in our lifetime (I like to believe that I invented TiVo when I was seven). But we usually don’t follow through on them (or this would be a story about a seven year old billionaire). Lauren, my best friend growing up, had also just moved home with her family. Her mom just got a new smart phone and was texting her constantly about dinner plans, grocery lists, and the appropriate time to be home. All of her messages were funny, but there was one in particular (now entitled “Tacos For Dinner)” that she needed to show me. I read it, laughed, and said, “When parents text, it’s hilarious”, Lauren immediately said, “That should be a website”.
Nine times out of ten we wouldn’t have actually done anything about it. If I was in school or Lauren had a full time job we probably never would have started When Parents Text. But I was babysitting, Lauren was interning, and we had time. So we started the website and in turn, started a business.
Within a few weeks we were being contacted by books agents, publishers, and even some TV producers looking to transform the website into different mediums. We were shocked, we had done absolutely nothing to promote our website, and we were getting a tremendous response. People were emailing us, “Why didn’t I think of this?!” and “Brilliant idea!”. So we started taking meetings and were thrown into our own version of business 101.
We had to quickly adapt to a world we knew little about: trademarks, partnerships, lawyers, agents, and joint bank accounts. We adapted and learned from our friends and family. We networked and made game-time decisions; we interviewed and hired a web designer. We were running a business without realizing it.
When we finally wrote a book and got paid our advance, it really sunk in: this is our job.
I wish someone had video taped our initial conversation (maybe there’s some sort of surveillance tape I can swipe from our local Panera?.) I want to see the looks on our faces, knowing what I know now. A year later I’ve moved out of my parent’s house, into New York City, wrote a book, and now are in talks for a television series. To top it all off, I accomplished this all with my best friend.
It’s a very awesome reality.
Eleanor Chestnut ‘10
I’ll be frank - I didn’t date in high school. Or in college. It’s not that I didn’t want to; it’s just that things never really seemed to work out. I would pine after classical guitarists who had secret girlfriends in Germany, develop crushes on friends who lived over 3,000 miles away, make moves on socially awkward guys who would say they “forgot something” and then run out of my room the moment I turned off the lights for a movie. (That happened.)
(Pictured left in both photos from my formative years)
And then there was school, sports, and music—priorities in my life that required a substantial amount of time and effort. I didn’t actually have the free time (or the energy) to meet new guys, not to mention access to a pool of guys I felt like I didn’t already know, considering I’d gone to school with the same people from pre-k until high school and my isolated college was actually smaller than my high school. I would think to myself, how does this ever work out for anyone? How do two people who would be compatible, given life’s circumstances, actually meet and give each other the time of day?
Well, I had no answer. And then I graduated college, moved to a new city and still had no answer, despite being surrounded by an entire urban population of strangers. I then realized that it wasn’t a matter of having people I could potentially meet, or of managing to meet the right person. Clearly, as my lack of experience suggested, I just didn’t know how to date.
I called a friend who had also recently moved to a new city to discuss this matter. I told her that I didn’t know how to meet guys, nor did I really know how to do anything outside of work other than join sports teams and sign up for tap dancing classes. “Listen,” she said, “just TRY OkCupid.” She had to say it that way because I’d already given her a hard time for joining an on-line dating site, which she’d done a few months earlier. I mean, how do you know who those people are? What if they’re crazy? Aren’t people losers and socially inept if they can’t manage to meet people in everyday life? Wait—then am I a loser and socially inept? I eventually swallowed my pride and made a profile. And then I made my friend read through it every time I edited a paragraph to make sure I sounded cool. ”Remember when you made me read your college essay five billion times? This feels like that.”
I quickly realized, as did my friend, that there are a fair number of ridiculous and uncomfortable people on that site, as there are anywhere. (“Hi. Like ur smile. Do u kno what callipygian means?”) I also learned, however, that there are a lot of reasonable people on there, too—people who seem to be genuinely interested in exploring this new way of socializing. I ended up embracing the experience and agreeing to meet whomever sounded like they had interesting things to say. And it worked—I met a ton of new people. And, more importantly, I dated.
I met people I liked—who worked similar academic jobs, who cared about the world, who were busy, like me—and it was exciting. Not only that, but I also became much more comfortable making conversation with people I knew little about, I gained dating experience with all different kinds of personalities, and I came closer to understanding what it is that’s important to me and what I’m looking for in any sort of relationship, be it romantic or not.
Some people try to say that meeting people on-line is “unnatural” or “cheating”. You go in already knowing something about the other person, so it’s easier, or weird, or something. But really, what does that even mean? You still have to greet each other in person and actually like each other. You still have to spend time together, get to know each other, and decide where you want your relationship to go. And if meeting a person happens to develop into something more, what does it matter how you met?
OkCupid simply did the job of putting me in touch with people I might otherwise have never gotten the chance to know, and for that, I am grateful.
Illustration by Lauren Kaelin
Julia Phillips ‘10
To all those of you who are sensible, gentle, and forgiving of yourselves, who deserve great things but understand that you will not always get everything you deserve or even everything you want, and who, though you have experienced many hardships, have the perspective to understand that countless triumphs are still in store: Congratulations! You are wonderful. Please find another article to read.
To those whose lives are 100% magnificent, who are without blemish, who have jobs you love, graduate teaching assistantships, affordable apartments, book deals, and optioned sitcoms: Congratulations. Get out of here.
Now, to the rest of us, thank god. We’re alone together so we can finally talk about what the others wouldn’t understand: the fear. What fear? you say as a bead of sweat rolls down your temple. Oh, you know the one. THE fear.
The fear comes from working a job you hate. You’re disappointed every day. Leaving the office, you call your mom to bitch without taking a breath. You may even cry in the bathroom during lunch.
Or maybe it comes from losing out on that golden opportunity. You labored over your graduate school applications and got back…nothing. You’ve started biting your cuticles.
It comes from moving your clothes and books back into your childhood bedroom. You hang out these days at the same bars where the substitute teachers from your high school go.
Sometimes—forgive us our pettiness—it comes from checking Facebook and seeing that everyone you once knew is now more attractive and fun-loving than you are. They’re taking Hipstamatic photos of each other wearing animal masks in Central Park while you’re sitting on your futon eating macaroni and cheese from a plastic bowl.
It’s THE fear, the fear of being a failure forever, the fear that the life you wanted will never arrive. The fear comes after your first big setback, and sometimes you suspect it’ll never leave. What do you do? You cope. But how? HOW? How do you live knowing that now you have to adjust your ambitions? How do you reconcile that the person you are is not who you wish you were? How do you deal with the fact that you are now in your late-early-twenties, so soon you will be in your early-mid-twenties, so soon you will be sixty-four, so soon you will be DEAD, and NONE OF THE GREAT THINGS YOU WANTED FOR YOURSELF WILL COME TO PASS?
I KNOW, RIGHT?
I know. I know. Don’t worry, I made us a flowchart.
Here’s how you live, people like me (who are nervous, determined, teeth-grinding, self-evaluating; who respond to people saying, “But you’re still so young, everything can change!” by raking your nails over your face and moaning, “YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND!”) You think of everything in your whole strange, mixed-up, suddenly foreign life. Then you sort all that stuff out, and you decide to cherish some things and change others.
What I changed last year: jobs, volunteer communities, country of residence.
What I treasured: partner, friends, and family. Macaroni and cheese. The same ambitions I thought I might have to abandon.
The fear subsides and resurfaces. Keep going. There will come moments, years, or decades when you may have to scrap whole sections of your life, but that’s okay; people live that way; you will be happy. At the very least, look around you at all of the rest of us: Congratulations, you’re not alone.
Lauren Kaelin ‘10
My father grew up in a small town in NJ and was the first in his family to go to college. He lived at home during his undergrad and then spent 16 months in Grenada working with the Peace Corps.
Slides from my father’s childhood in Pompton Lakes, NJ. Curated by Matt Kaelin.
He said that was a gap in his life. Or, he might say, he filled a gap in his life with that experience. Gaps shouldn’t have a negative connotation, he’d say, but rather, simply, “your life is defined by the gaps.” Make the most of them, he said, savor them.
I’m preparing to end my summer in Toledo [Ohio] and for lack of a better and equally financially responsible decision- I’m going to move back home for a bit. And part of me feels defeated.
Or maybe that’s a gap within a gap?
[Originally posted on August 28, 2010 on A Jukebox Graduate]
