Alumni Status

So I drafted this particular post on the plane en route to Hawaii where I'm vacationing with my familia for the week. I don't know when I'll next have internet access, but I'll do my best to keep you posted on how my emotional state declines over the next few weeks. Bring on the real quarter life crisis.

Yesterday I graduated from college. And while I'm usually a bottomless well of words and epithets, this particular pivot has somehow left me at a complete loss for comprehension. I'm genuinely not sure whether it's denial or whether I'm just unable to process all the implications of this paradigm shift, but either way the nausea and dizziness that I have come to associate with acceptance and reality come in brief  and potent spurts.

And with this state of affairs and the cycles my thoughts run in, I'm convinced that the challenge is not in the changing, but in the leaving. Months of conditioning can easily prepare a grad for the dismal job market or the feelings of uncertainty that accompany the black hole that its my life. I have lists of remedies for the post-collegiate apocalypse, ways to keep my mind sharp; ways to encounter new ideas; ways to maintain a social life in the sticks. But the the thoughts that send me spiraling and the fears I can't quiet have nothing to do with college as a period or as an institution, and even less to do with having to wrap up my time there. They have to do with the people who have become my allies, my enemies, friends, and spirit guides. How do you navigate that change? The unpredictable future of path crossing? How do you answer the most painful question "When will we see each other again?" without breaking down in a family restaurant.

Maybe you can't. Maybe that's how we know people and groups have come to mean something, have come to signify something intrinsic to your existance. Leaving college really is OK. I'm at peace with the four years of fast food, bureaucratic bullshit, and sub-par students. But then again, maybe the real reason I'm ok with that idea and not with the idea of leaving my firends is that I know my University will be here in 1, 17, 43 years. It's not going anywhere. It's not moving. And it would take a skilled and dedicated team of arsonists to burn it to the ground. And the seven grenerations of Trojans that I've had the pleasure of sharing campus with suggest some continuity to the skill and passion of the student body. If there's any shift it's definitely in an upward direction. School is stable, unchanging, (save my departure) and is definitely constant in a way that goes against post grad anxiety of whirlwind change.

My social life can't boast the same continuity. I leave and the infant's nightmare becomes my reality: not seeing it means it has all disappeared. Our separartion is not temporary or imagined but permanent and unavoidable. I close my eyes and its all gone. NOone to grab lunch with or run into at coffee bean or share a glass of wine with at midnight or share war stories of crazy professors with. The opportunities fade immediately and it's not just the rest of the world that sinks but me along with it.

I know the next 12 months, no matter what they bring, will change my social behavior, my sleeping patterns, my standards of acceptability...so perhaps it's unfair to accept anything different from my firends. But that won't stop me from lamenting our communal change, perhaps the only thing we share in our respecive states of isolation.

This mental meandering is really just a long way of saying "damn, it's so fucking hard to say goodbye to the people imbedded in our lives," but maybe that beats the alternative. Then again, says the all-consuming soreness in my heart, maybe it doesn't.