Ch-ch-ch-changes...

So things are changing for both of us, Pangloss. I'm going to Wisconsin and you're headed out Colorado way. Quite a change from our prospects a mere month ago. Dismal prospects have shifted to bright opportunities, dark alleyways have opened into illuminated...alleyways.

Alleyways, of course, are narrow. They box you into a route. No turn around, no lateral movement, no offshoots. There may be a the garbage of a Korean restaurant in the way, and a mangy, rabid dog. But the only way to travel once you're inside the alleyway is forward, until you find your way out. You have to endure it the entire way. Right to the point where the metaphor loses all reasonable purpose.

I think my new job is steering me to a position of creature comforts, financial stability and social cachet. No more insulting patrons sneering at me. But I wonder how brave I am to pursue the things I sought. Will I break it off? I leave tomorrow.

The odd thing, and maybe, who knows, we can return to our subtitle's motivation with this thought, is that both of us are heading into relatively recession proof industries. The economy is going through all sorts of hell right now, but I'm going into healthcare and you're guiding wealthy WASPs down mountains. Neither of these situations will be affected. How weird is that?

Congrats

Martin, I congratulate you on what sounds like a successful interview and on finding a good company to work for. And as for your qualms about reconciling your past plans with your current situation, I would not worry too much. Ideals and dreams are a beautiful thing and we should all strive to achieve them to their nth degree. But it is a fact of our flawed human existence that it cannot be so.

Just because we cannot immediately dedicate our life to the cause in which we believed wholeheartedly does not make us immoral or lesser human beings. Indeed, if we manage to keep alive that belief through the harsh reality of our world, then that is all the more credit to our faith and belief in the idea that we are called to something greater. And transcending that immediate difficulty to achieve noble things testifies that we are more than those we must tread with in daily drudgery, in secure but unfulfilling work.

Do not worry about losing that desire to go abroad, to see and do great things, to help where it is needed. If that dream cannot survive in the face of security, prosperity, and comfort, then it is a dream not worth having. And if that dream fades despite your desire to keep it alive, then it is not meant to be. We cannot control our situation or station in life, but we can control our choices. Choose to seek that path in your daily life; awake and say, "Today will put me one step closer to what I know is right." If in the end you follow that dream, then wonderful. If not, then don't lose sleep over it. Choice is the only thing we can really control and Fate must rule the rest.

Again, I congratulate you, Martin. Go with boldness along this path, for that is all one can do if unsure. Choose your dreams.

An interview

Pangloss, sorry I have been so long in posting a response. You see, I was out of town. I had a job interview. For a real job.

It was a crazy experience -- the company paid for my flight to their location, paid for my stay at a (nice) hotel, bought dinner, breakfast and lunch, and picked up every taxi bill as well. My first thought, as soon as I arrived at the hotel, was how bizarre it seemed that a company would be so interested in me. After all, six months before any given day this week, I was probably drunk on Spring Break. I thought, if these people only knew me well enough, they'd realize how silly it is to hire me. But then, that's how a lot of people feel, I bet.

Of course, this company is a real company with huge revenue numbers. They're capitalist to the bone. They're expanding rapidly. They're the opposite of what I thought I would do when I graduated. And now that I'm in the running for a real job with real pay and real benefits, it unsettles me that I am so excited at the possibility of abandoning the hopes I had when I was in college for a life that eschewed conventionality in favor of vibrancy. What does this mean for me?

For starters, I haven't completely abandoned my ethics. The company is incredibly gracious and very concerned about doing the right thing. It's not Google, but they're motto is not very different from Google's "Don't be evil" mantra. So I've either a) found the shining example of responsible profit-motive or b) been seduced. Either way, though, I've let something slip since college. Taking this job, if I'm offered it, doesn't mean that I'm entirely selling out, but it does mean that already, in the three months since graduation, I've become something of that person I used to disparage. You know, the college-age liberal who was not quite so willing to forgo the luxuries provided him in the safe environment of the university when he was on his own. "Fight for world peace, until you find that you might have to go without HBO!"

It also means that I have to abandon, at least for a few years, my plan to go international. It once was incredibly formalized and had since devolved into little more than foreign vagrancy, but it still holds a dear place in my heart. Deny that? For a job? Where is my gusto? In six months, I might only be able to find it in my locker at the country club.

The company, though, really was great. I'd love to work for them, at any age, which is part of what makes this process so frustrating. If I had already gone into the great big world to have my adventure, then this is exactly where I'd like to work when I came home. The company really seems perfect, save one thing. While they may have arranged all flights and accomodations, I did still have to pay for parking at the airport.

A good thing

Sometime over the past week and a half, I had some long conversations with friends who are still undergrads. The talks were typical, mulling over common interests with lazy pleasure. It was good to know that these friends had not abandoned me since I departed the university. But somewhere in the conversation, it became clear to both of us that while our friendship is not tied to my alma mater, I was certainly graduated and he was certainly not. And in that recognition, I did find at least one light shining in our collective darkness, Pangloss. We do not have to start another year of college this week.

Summer has been a bit of a blow-off season. I've searched for jobs and scrounged for quarters, but I've also spent a lot of June, July and August "taking time off." I've been drunk. I've spent hours listening to records. I started a blog. The depression of our condition is no reason to take heart, but the fact that I am, for all my non-starting, in the real world and not tied to the academic institution forces a smile. So Pangloss, times are grim, things are rough, but we do not have to wake for a class, study for a test or ponder theoretical interpretations of the presence of uncircumcised penises in modern French film. At least, not for a grade. And we are adults. So that's a good thing.

The desert of our youth

This is it, Martin, that great, vast expanse of wilderness where enthusiasm, idealism, and dreams perish. If we look backward, their scattered bones, bleached white by the sun, mark the trail we have followed, right into the Kalahari of post-graduate hope. Denied of spiritual sustenance, the water of life if you will, our faculties diminish to a faint glimmer of what they once were. Intelligence, sharpness of thought and tongue, energy for the task at hand, gone. Delusions, like thirst, set in and fog our mind, clouding our judgments and leading us to decisions which only worsen our condition.

What do I mean by this? I mean that in taking jobs we never dreamed of wanting, setting marginal, petty goals that amount to little more than survival, and wallowing in malaise, we are like a lost man straggling toward a mirage. We think it is what we want but in the end, whatever we hoped it would bring will vanish, just like all the hopes that we carried out of our alma mater's doors.

It is one thing to have a spiritual crisis, to not know one's own purpose and direction in life, to search for a new path when the sought-after one was blocked. Such a trial can be hard even under good conditions, where one is secure inside an institution or community or station in life. But confronting such a crisis while broke, luckless in finding a legitimate job, bereft of friends, and reduced emotionally to the level of a middle schooler by one's parents, is devastating. Devastating in the way carpet bombing is devastating.

Where does one go? Drawing inward is the only defense, trying to escape those external tormentors with the hope that one's internals will survive intact. But even that effort might prove fruitless in the end. One might deny one's capacity for living (and not merely existing) so much that it will be forgotten, blown away in a sandstorm which disorients the self as to its direction and goal.

Let us hope that there is an escape from this desert before it becomes too late, too late for us even to care about our pained musings on this site. But I do not know, Martin, if we will be that lucky.