The Year One

If I still followed a collegiate calendar and schedule, I will have just about wrapped up my freshman year of real-life. If in fact real life constitutes any length of time post undergrad, or that way-station layover before graduate-school.

Like all first efforts it began with anxiety, a brief period of weightlessness and wondering in a new context before rooting my feet to the earth and realizing I hadn’t beamed to any new or distant planet and yes, this WAS still oxygen my ‘pitiful’ neophyte lungs were filtering.

In college they try and set you on the productive and narrow by hammering home certain, “realities”, outlining your prospectus as follows:

--Nearly twenty-something hours of homework and reading a week
--A seminar on STD’s and the morning after pill and the pitfalls of irresponsible sex.
--A lecture about how all too easy it is to fall victim to excess partying, and how, oh it WILL result in academic probation and failure.

Et.al…

Eventually you are able to see through their vision of academia, brick and steel citadel spires soon become just buildings with desks and projector screens, classrooms you will sit in semester in and out, with the same noisy heater that drowns out a different professor’s voice. You soon calculate that it takes more effort to get yourself kicked out of school than it does to stand on your tip-toes and really “reach” for that bare minimum standard of 2.0 academic excellence.

The Year One, A.G., (commonly “After Graduation”. Can also be referred to as Pre-Graduate Era) began with a simple online writing class, (credits required to actually finish my bachelor’s) which helped me to regain the confidence a negative senior year took a flame thrower to. I realized that, while I had yet to fully establish a voice or a definitive style to call my own, I could as my uncle coined, rub two words together and through resulting linguistic friction produce a fire. I began to trust my imagination again, and that out of that strange expanding universe were stories worth telling. I remembered how much I liked to make things up.

Next on my syllabus was the Graduate Record Examination, or, G.R.E. I put it off during my senior year, each month setting a new date for it. When circumstances finally drove home the fact that I would not be going to grad-school the Fall following graduation, I let it simmer on the back burner like something overdone and neglected.

On a June morning, I paid the $120 fee, set the countdown to a month, bought a G.R.E. prep book, and cracked it twice the week before the exam, walked into the testing center and, in a lack-luster performance, drudged through the most gratuitous, irritating performance test I had ever sat in on. More accurately called SAT 2.5, it drills you on your ability to answer some randomly generated moral quandary by sticking to uniform argumentative methods and rigidly standardized academic paper-writing rules, followed by a section of incredibly loose analogies and reading comprehension, overflowing with obscure, often times DEAD vocabulary even the best authors out there make it a POINT to shy away from. Still, you never know when you may have to stand and snobbishly argue your case in front of Parliament.

CROMWELLIAN Parliament…

Though I keep one handy at my desk, I do not sleep with a thesaurus under my pillow…

There was a math section. I think. The 350 I scored on THAT particular section I owe mostly to playing the odds (a., b., c., or d. means a 25% chance each time) and loosely on which examples I chose to SKIP.

I met someone. We dated a bit. It didn’t work out. I was really bummed for a while. We have remained friends. I am grateful for that.

I started this blog, originally as a tuner for my writing more than a personal outlet or virtual diary. It was to be the drawing board for all my writing ideas, non-fiction and creative alike, and provide writing samples, believe it or not, for possible employers.

I neglect it a bit. It’s been more of a sounding board for my angst of late than anything. Kudos to any consistent readership I may have.

I went on a few fruitless job interviews. One for a newspaper I have since freelanced for a few times. During the interview I managed to, through signature Adam with and snark, insult the alma mater of the managing editor. She tried comparing the student body of Wesleyan University, just down the street from the paper, and their impact on the town of Middletown to that of Quinnipiac University in my town of Hamden, where she had gone.

Um. Ah…

Couldn’t let it slide. I let her know that perhaps it was different in her time, but Quinnipiac is currently a haven for WASPY, upper-middle class douche-bags and its presence buying up all the property in Hamden does little to enrich it culturally, or artistically like Yale in New Haven, or like Wesleyan would if only the old-fart townies in Middlesex would EMBRACE the liberal presence of the college.

Perhaps a bit subjective… At least it showed I was trying to get a job.

I began writing for an online-zine dedicated to arts and culture in CT. Whereas it had gained early momentum and made a move toward an actual tangible PAPER, it has since folded.

Did some online news blogging. That lasted about 15 minutes.

Got a job at a bookstore, where I currently still work. Told myself by six months I would be out of there. This was in December. Working in customer service I have, if nothing else, surprised myself with my capacity in dealing with an unreasonable, often times idiotic public. We are a College Barnes & Noble responsible for selling text books to Yale students. While they remain fashionably sensitive, very liberal, and boast knowledge and opinions forged in classrooms with academic resources backed by an endowment tens of billions of dollars deep, indicative of a university on the highest plateau of the world's educational echelon...The common Yalie tends to lack a certain degree of broader social commonsense and worldly tact.

Street smarts...

God bless them, what with the world they are inheriting. Sometimes I feel great sympathy and anxiety for them, before I realize that we are all actually in the same life-boat, rowing frantically while trying our hardest to plug the leak in the bottom, schlepping pails of water out that threaten to sink us.

Did a little more freelance stuff, and realized it’s not the direction I really want to focus my strongest efforts, though will continue to slowly amass a portfolio of clips.
…

I researched grad schools. Well, more accurately, I vacillated, as unfortunately I continue to do as application deadlines have passed by, over a pantheon of MFA programs I worry won’t have me once I ever get a portfolio together. I think I’ve narrowed it down to six or so, maybe eight… Now all I need is about twenty-five pages of original work to show them.

…

Like in school, I think the self-applied pressure of having to impress with my writing is what holds me back, prevents me from the joy of the creative process and making things up. I’m hoping investment in another writing course remedies this funk.

Met someone else. At work. Didn’t think that would happen for a long time. Nothing happened. My timing, what a surprise, was off. She is leaving in the fall for grad-school. We are friends…I think. It’s hard to tell sometimes.

As an adult I think I need to enroll myself in a relationship refresher course.

Like in college, doors have been open and simultaneously closed; I was allowed to wet my feet with a few different pursuits before ultimately finding myself back where my real talents and passions lie. But unlike my foray into college, I refuse to settle in and grow too comfortable, and I do what I can to remain that way. The worst thing for me would be to find myself in the same place a year from now, as others move to the next tier in their lives.

As I approach year two of reality, the future seams so simple and yet so complex. It’s in my hands, almost completely. It hinges on my willingness to sit in front of a keyboard and type. They say sophomore year is the toughest. The training wheels go and the hill becomes steeper. It becomes easy here to float and fall off; to add miles of winding, brushy road between you and that goal.

Sophomoritis. That’s what they call it, anyway.

I turn twenty-five this year.

YIKES.

Wish me luck.

Maybe I won’t need any.

Maybe just a push. A positive, collective well-wishing jolt.