Commencement
I was in the Starbucks on the corner of East Beltline and 28th Street. There were six clear plastic tubs full of stuff from my dorm room in the trunk of my car.
It wasn’t the happiest moment of my life.
It wasn't because the coffee was disgusting -- it was extremely acceptable. It was because I was forced to clear out my room. It was the end of spring semester and campus was now closed to students so the staff could get ready for graduation.
Normally, I would be on my way home, blasting Halsey or Pentatonix, and imagining my best friend Rachel's reaction when I walked in her front door the next night. Alas, not this year. My sister was graduating so I had to stay an extra three days. My parents were rolling into town in a few hours and I was learning what it felt like to be homeless. If you have money, being homeless isn’t that bad -- especially if it’s only for a few hours and a Starbucks is open.
I sipped my grande black drip and opened the Huffington Post. A big bold headline filled my vision. It was a smaller, yet excellently contrasting, red sub-headline ending with an exclamation point under a photo of Hillary Clinton. It took up half my screen.
I had recently settled on an internet news headquarters by Googling “what news site is the most like "Slugline" in "House of Cards.”
I liked the chaotic homepage; it seemed more raw which, to me, meant unbiased. My faith in HuffPo’s objectivity took a laughably long time to fade away, but in the meantime I developed a puppy-dog affection for the site.
I had two and a half hours to kill, since my sister was graciously allowing me to crash at her on-campus apartment at three. For some reason, she was still allowed to be there even though I had to leave the dorm. I wasn’t salty at all. Two and a half hours: why not become who I was meant to be? I should have plenty of time.
I had declared my political science major during first semester and added a journalism minor during second. I had set myself up, but I hadn’t become myself yet.
Fast forward nearly eighteen months and the 2016 Presidential Election is almost over. I have finally become who I think I’m supposed to be.
In three and a third years, I’ve gone from being a physics major with a chemistry minor to a staff writer on the student newspaper, a member of the Calvin Odyssey Community, a research assistant on two different faculty projects in the Poly-Sci department, and now I’m diving head first into a thesis tentatively entitled The Effects of Presidential Foreign Policy Rhetoric Containing American Exceptionalist Ideas on International Support for American Combat Operations.
I’ve reached the show. The problem is, now that I’m here, I have to stay here. I have to produce something. I have to prove my worth.
Actualization has always been my Achilles heel. I get these grandiose ideas in my head and theorize the hell out of them. I imagine my future life to the smallest detail: from what the walk to my car will look like to how the head speechwriting office will smell. I've imagined how I’m going to decorate my loft that happens to be above my favorite Georgetown bar. I've visualized my six month jaunt through Spain and France that continues down into Turkey and Israel, subsidized by the obscene royalty checks I get from my best-selling autobiography.
I want to skip to the end. When I engineer my future I say, “I’m going to work my heart out to make this happen.” In the ecstatic moment that comes when an idea is born in its purest, most uncorrupted, most elegant, most achievable form, the work necessary to realize it seems trivial.
The idea reaches its lowest, most mundane, most trivial point during those long nights spent slaving away over a laptop, an empty beer bottle next to my left hand and strands of think blonde hair falling in front of my bloodshot, stinging eyes.
How can I push through the tedium and reach nirvana?
Your guess is as good as mine.
I finished reading the first of many articles outlining who had the best chance to win the Republican nomination for President and glanced at the clock in the bottom right corner of my computer screen. The numbers 1:15 pm stared back at me. I had an hour and forty five minutes left on the streets. I exhaled through a grim smile and switched from HuffPo to Netflix, settling in for an episode of Bloodline. I figured, for the time being, I would insulate my beautiful, virgin, unblemished future from the horrors and tragedies of hard work and setbacks, sure to pursue it to my wits end as soon as I took the first step. Netflix is great that way.
