Right now I have a basketball hangover the size of a tractor-trailer. The campus is in mourning. Most of us agree the best thing that can happen on Monday is for a small meteor to crash into the Alamodome. Even Adam Lucas had no wit or wisdom except to wallow in the misery of defeat for 1,100 words. There’s really not much to say. Kansas simply ran us out of the gym on Saturday night.
The end of basketball season was surreal. All year I never once doubted that we were going to win a national championship. Guess this is what arrogance gets you. I just can’t believe my last college basketball game as a student has passed. Next time I watch the Heels play, I’ll be an alumni. Aren’t those supposed to be the old folks we have to cajole into standing up and getting loud when Carolina needs a run in the Smith Center? It adds another concrete detail to the still abstract conception that graduation is little more than a month away.
mi5intelligensia: the end is near
mi5intelligensia: which means you should write some emo blog entry about it
mi5intelligensia: and tag me on facebook
mi5intelligensia: make it happen
On Monday April 14, 2008 I’m giving a reading along with four other senior honors fiction students in the Graham Memorial Lounge. It’s my first and in all likelihood last public reading of fiction I’ll ever do. As I write this, it’s 2 a.m., I have a massive pile of laundry sitting on my bed, 15 more pages of thesis that need writing, quadruple that many that need revision, a rough draft of a paper that’s due Tuesday, and two more papers due the following week. Under normal circumstances, I’d probably be freaking out right now. But this is my last semester. I already have a job. I know that win, lose or tie, it’s not going to make that much of a difference. Senioritis is the fun word for it. Perspective is probably closer to the truth. I feel like I’m in transition. I don’t feel like I’m fully a student anymore, even though I’m still in college, but I don’t feel fully “adult” either.
I’ve thought a lot about what it means to be an “adult” lately. Is it buying your own health insurance? Is it paying more than $20,000 per year in taxes? Is it having any clue how a 401(k) works? If it’s any of those things, then I guess I’m going to be an “adult” pretty soon, but something tells me none of that’s really true.
Why does this question about adulthood matter? It probably doesn’t. I spent two hours tonight playing with this Duncan yo-yo that my mom gave me at Easter. It took me a while, but I finally got the sucker to start sleeping, which is where it spins at the end of the string for a few seconds instead of coming back to your hand immediately. Once I got that working I starting doing all the tricks I learned in middle school like walk the dog and rock the cradle and around the world. It reminded me of childhood as something separate, not just as something that already took place. The point is, neither my mother nor my father would spend two hours playing with a yo-yo on a Sunday night. So the question remains. If I’m not an adult now, when do I become one?
I promise I did that plug for the senior reading for a reason, and I’m getting to it. Everything I’m writing feels like it’s building into this idea of “giving up on your dreams,” but I don’t know if that’s what or how I want to say things. That’s such a bomb to drop. Not to mention that it’s cliché as hell to say you’ve given up on your dreams. Add in the fact that I’m only 21 years old and it becomes downright maudlin.
But in a way, I feel like that’s what I’m doing.
Why do I write? It’s a question that gets re-animated every time I address it. Why ask why do I write? Why not just write? I write because it helps me discover things I can’t figure out any other way. I also write to escape. One of the things I’ve learned is that as full as the world is with naïve idiots who want to stop genocides in Africa by wearing t-shirts and achieve gender equality by having women stand on stage and talk about their vaginas, the world is equally full with malicious, evil, soul-sucking people who want nothing more than to step on you for personal gain. At the end of the day, the number of people who would make a genuine sacrifice to help you out is generally less than five. And if it’s even so much as one, you should consider yourself lucky.
None of this is even coherent. Four years of school and I can’t even write a two-page personal essay with a discernible story or argument. But that’s kind of what graduation is like, right? It’s like you’re just swimming in jello waiting for someone to tell you what to do next, when all of a sudden you realize nobody’s going to tell you what to do next.
And maybe I didn’t give up on my dreams. But I certainly did shelve them. The job I took has a no-blogging policy, so I cant say much except that the job has nothing to do with being a writer whatsoever.
Throughout most of college I’ve been heart-set on writing. One of the first things I did here was join the conservative magazine. I wanted to be a journalist and a novelist and a columnist and a blogger and basically everything that involved putting ideas onto paper. But I suffer from this nagging feeling that I’m just deluding myself. That I have nothing important to say. That I’m not a good journalist nor a good writer or anything. I feel like a hack. I’m not helping people, I’m not breaking down ideas and sharing metaphors for others to understand. No, I self-servingly write to escape. I’ve always been writing to escape. Because when you write fiction or scribble in a journal, you get to make up realities where it’s okay not to know how everything is going to turn out. Where the villains get to be hated. Where the heros are likeable. Where everything gets tied up nice and neat and there’s a theme and a message and everyone walks away happy. I write to escape because reality is harsh and most of the time sucks. It sucks especially because when you’re privileged, and you know your privileged, you’re not even allowed to feel bad about life sucking. Because you’re privileged. I feel like my whole life has been filled with one word: opportunity. I’ve been raised to believe, and immersed in an environment that supported the notion, that I could do or be anything I wanted to do or be. But I guess the vestige of child in me is still swimming in that jello. I just want someone to say, “you should do this,” and I don’t want to feel like I need to question whatever that someone says. I just want to follow it.
I’m the freest fucking person in the world, and I have no idea what I should do.