wherever you go, there you are--
May. 2nd, 2001 08:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
like_a_clownand wherever you are makes the places you've been seem so lame it's painful to think of how seriously you took them.
Take high school, for example. When I was there, it seemed like the whole world was contained within the forty-thousand-dollar anti-ditcher fence. I knew everything about Great Artistry, and my sorrows and triumphs made up a pool I could drown in. Movies don't help to speed up the shattering of this illusion: American Pie culminates at the rich kids' graduation, and there's no sense of an expected future after the hot-dog restaurant.
I had no idea how hackneyed the criticisms of even an intelligent high school student could be until I did a bit of Web-surfing. It seems to me now that the entire suburban population of the United States that still has to sneak cigarettes falls into two color-codable categories: Powder Blue and Greasy Black Glitter. If I could make them all into human basketballs and shoot them, I'd only need the two goals. Some bounce around a little on one rim or the other before dropping in; others hardly even disturb the net. Today, I would probably get wedged in between the rim and backboard of Black: while I have never owned one shred of Volcom and gave up baseball hats before high school, I was not really accepted amongst the freaky kids either. God knows why; perhaps the un-Spandex-able gut had a thing or two to do with it.
Seriously. Look around the next populated high school you pass. Every girl will look either like she came straight from the Hot Topic dressing room or jumped out of a Roxy catalog, while every boy will sport either head-to-toe Adidas (and red baseball hat) or Slipknot shirt, black baggy jeans, and spiky hair. In addition, the lines between the two are blurring as we speak--jocks LIKE metal now, and Hot Topic sells Blink shirts.
The thing about it is, all the Black Greasy kids say the same stuff: "I'm sick. Football suX. I want to go smoke. Here's a poem about eternal darkness and silver eyeshadow." Yes, I was guilty. At least, I appear to my current self to have been guilty. That's why I cringe.
But when I was there, graduation seemed as final as death. What came after was as murky as the prospect of an afterlife appears now. Same with college--I HATE the idea that in a year and a half I will be asked what I plan on doing next, and the certainty that "next" has no definite end. I mean, you go to college thinking that you have four years to make or break. You graduate, and...what? You have to call your own shots. No class ranking tells you how close you are to successful completion of your objective. There is no General Catalog to tell you what you have to accomplish in order to move on to the next level--I'm not even sure there's a next level to move on to. This is beautiful, as well. But it's not exactly comforting to someone with such a perpetual lack of certainty of whether he's even happy at all, much less what he needs to accomplish to make himself happy. I am clueless on matters so trivial as to what sounds best for lunch. I cringe at the idea of having to decide whether I'd be happier selling fiberoptics and living in a sweet house or playing guitar for tips on the Blue Line.
I don't know WHAT I'm gonna do, and the difference between high school and college, and college and life, feels the same as that from trike to training wheels, and training wheels to unicycle.
(if you're still here: the preceding contains ridiculously polarized representations of certain scenarios meant to bring them to light, NOT to effect melodrama. Read with the understanding that this is not bitching, but exploration. It's called dry humor as catharsis.)
Take high school, for example. When I was there, it seemed like the whole world was contained within the forty-thousand-dollar anti-ditcher fence. I knew everything about Great Artistry, and my sorrows and triumphs made up a pool I could drown in. Movies don't help to speed up the shattering of this illusion: American Pie culminates at the rich kids' graduation, and there's no sense of an expected future after the hot-dog restaurant.
I had no idea how hackneyed the criticisms of even an intelligent high school student could be until I did a bit of Web-surfing. It seems to me now that the entire suburban population of the United States that still has to sneak cigarettes falls into two color-codable categories: Powder Blue and Greasy Black Glitter. If I could make them all into human basketballs and shoot them, I'd only need the two goals. Some bounce around a little on one rim or the other before dropping in; others hardly even disturb the net. Today, I would probably get wedged in between the rim and backboard of Black: while I have never owned one shred of Volcom and gave up baseball hats before high school, I was not really accepted amongst the freaky kids either. God knows why; perhaps the un-Spandex-able gut had a thing or two to do with it.
Seriously. Look around the next populated high school you pass. Every girl will look either like she came straight from the Hot Topic dressing room or jumped out of a Roxy catalog, while every boy will sport either head-to-toe Adidas (and red baseball hat) or Slipknot shirt, black baggy jeans, and spiky hair. In addition, the lines between the two are blurring as we speak--jocks LIKE metal now, and Hot Topic sells Blink shirts.
The thing about it is, all the Black Greasy kids say the same stuff: "I'm sick. Football suX. I want to go smoke. Here's a poem about eternal darkness and silver eyeshadow." Yes, I was guilty. At least, I appear to my current self to have been guilty. That's why I cringe.
But when I was there, graduation seemed as final as death. What came after was as murky as the prospect of an afterlife appears now. Same with college--I HATE the idea that in a year and a half I will be asked what I plan on doing next, and the certainty that "next" has no definite end. I mean, you go to college thinking that you have four years to make or break. You graduate, and...what? You have to call your own shots. No class ranking tells you how close you are to successful completion of your objective. There is no General Catalog to tell you what you have to accomplish in order to move on to the next level--I'm not even sure there's a next level to move on to. This is beautiful, as well. But it's not exactly comforting to someone with such a perpetual lack of certainty of whether he's even happy at all, much less what he needs to accomplish to make himself happy. I am clueless on matters so trivial as to what sounds best for lunch. I cringe at the idea of having to decide whether I'd be happier selling fiberoptics and living in a sweet house or playing guitar for tips on the Blue Line.
I don't know WHAT I'm gonna do, and the difference between high school and college, and college and life, feels the same as that from trike to training wheels, and training wheels to unicycle.
(if you're still here: the preceding contains ridiculously polarized representations of certain scenarios meant to bring them to light, NOT to effect melodrama. Read with the understanding that this is not bitching, but exploration. It's called dry humor as catharsis.)
