Ten years ago today, I had been out of college for about six weeks. I had taken four years that were supposed to be about a)intensive study in my chosen field or b) intensive care after partying four nights a week and chosen c) “neither,” devoting the bulk of my time to student quasi-government and extracurriculars that exposed me to the maximum amount of behind-the-scenes administrative hypocrisy, frustration, and “executive board meetings.” If I’d had it to do over, I’d have spent a lot more time at the radio station. I did not have it to do over.

Having neither partied nor picked a career path in any meaningful way, I left academia cranky and adrift. Having grown more than accustomed to calling my own shots for a few years, the prospect of moving back into my parents house was anticipated with all the excitement of a trip to the gallows. (At my school, the end of senior year culminated in “senior week,” when studies were over but the seniors were allowed to remain in their dorm rooms and party before graduation. I did not participate in any senior week activities, but I told my parents that it went on for a month and spent that month sleeping on my girlfriend’s floor rather than face the inevitable.) But move back in I did, having failed to come up with any non-blood-plasma-based source of rent before May, and though my relationship with my parents had never dipped below “cordial” in all the time I’d been alive the air began filling with poison like a sub that had been underwater too long. They didn’t know what to do with me; I didn’t know what to do with me; the cracks were definitely going to start showing if I didn’t come up with some kind of outlet and/or source of cheap opiates.

It was under those conditions that ten years ago today (well, tomorrow) I started what would become this site. Fascinated with the then-new web, I wanted to put something out there but had nothing new to say about any subject that didn’t already have ten sites listed in Infoseek. I was an expert in bitching about myself, though, especially in July 1997. So I sat down at the keyboard and put the best available face on. In theory, I have grown as a person since then, but looking back on that first entry today (as you will now do) I can’t help noticing how many 1997 attitudes are exactly the same as the 2007 attitudes, as well as laughing out loud in glorious thanksgiving about all the things that have changed. I stopped updating the site for a good year or two in there, when it got so grim that even I didn’t want to know about it, but I’m glad I never tossed it. Its purpose may evolve a bit in the coming months– blogs are all too commonplace in 2007 (goddammit)– but it has been a useful chronicle of times that would have been otherwise forgotten. May the next ten years be as good as the last ten. Well, most of the last ten. All right, half of the last ten. Okay, the last four years. The last six months.

7/19/97

One of the best things about my life right now is that I somehow graduated from college. I don’t mean that I expected to fail; I’ve always been blessed with good grades, although whether I deserved them or not has always been a topic of debate. No, when I say it’s amazing that I graduated, I mean that I thought I’d be in college until I died. More precisely, I thought I would die from being in college. Between cafeteria food, dorm living, and the hordes of reckless imbeciles who only seemed to be getting dumber with each passing year, I was positive college would kill me. Somehow, someday, someone was going to pour beer on the floor and light it on fire, flames would spread through the shanty until they hit the cafeteria’s grease supply, and the resulting explosion would blast us to the Dakotas. By the time it was over, college had really wound down.

Graduation, however, never winds down. No matter how bad my life may get, I will never have to take another test again. There will never be another ten-page paper about Aztecs. There will never be another “finals week.” Never again will I have to care what Marx thought about Napoleon. I have earned the Magic Piece of Paper. If I ever decide to earn another, even more magical piece of paper, I can do it one class at a time for the next 45 years if I want to. I don’t expect I’ll want to.

So, what now? Well, now comes what I always thought would be the fun part. I get out of school, go to work wherever they’ll hire me, rent out some modest apartment somewhere, and start being Grown Up. Sure, dorm living was a kind of Grown Up simulator, but even in college there are far too many people intruding on your life. Leaving college and the dorms, I couldn’t wait to live someplace where I could cook my own dinner with whatever appliance I chose, without having to check a policy manual to see if it was okay. I couldn’t wait to leave classes in favor of work. If you hate your professor or your course of study, you more or less have to suffer through it. Either that or drop the class and justify yourself to your parents, your advisor, your friends, the janitor, etc. If you don’t like your job or your boss? Go the hell home and get a new one. No explanation necessary; you’re your own person. No parents, finally. No roommates, for better or worse. No responsibility to anyone but yourself and the people you choose to include. Your own space. Your own life. What a gift from God Almighty is the holy and blessed Graduation!

Or at least that’s what I thought for the first month of unemployment. See, it’s all fun and games until you run out of money. When I was still in the graduation process, I thought the world was at my feet. I sent out a couple resumes; I looked at apartments; I collected graduation checks from relatives. In a fit of stupidity, I told my parents they were controlling and overbearing, and that living with them drove me crazy, and that they could basically kiss off. I could afford to be brutally candid; after all, I was graduating.

Then, a funny thing happened: the resumes didn’t lead to anything. The apartment was no longer in my price range (considering that my price range was $0 a month). The graduation checks stopped coming. I had to move into the last place on earth I wanted to be, my parents’ new house in the middle of nowhere, with people who didn’t particularly want me to be there.

When my boyhood chums and I were in grade school, and someone tried to give us cooties or something, we would periodically defend ourselves from the attack by announcing that it was “Opposite Day,” thereby smiting our enemies with their own cooties. Well, every day since graduation has been Opposite Day. I have a degree, but I feel dumber than ever; I’m at “home”, but I have no idea where anything is; I have more life experience than I’ve ever had, but getting a job keeps getting harder and harder. And I probably have cooties.

My parents, who are both clinically neurotic, have somehow gotten the impression that my job hunt is a team effort and buzz around me like flies. Maybe it just seems that way after all those years of living relatively alone. Still, you know that sound a radio makes when the station is just out of range? That’s what my brain sounds like all the time when I’m at home.

My sister, who has gone absolutely schizo since going off to college, spends most of her time pouting because she had to go to summer school instead of following Phish. Last week, workers started cutting down trees across the street to build a house. This made my sister so mad that she threatened to “go get an axe and cut them down and see how they like it.” Needless to say, I sleep with my door locked and I certainly do not walk on the grass.

The rest of the world hasn’t made things any easier on me. During graduation season, Tom Brokaw and the other nightly news guys fell all over themselves to make me feel like an idiot. For years now, the nightly news would do a story every May about how graduates could expect a crappy economy and insurmountable employment odds. So, what was the story when I graduated and couldn’t find work? “This just in: any monkey can fall out of a tree and get a job this year, especially if the monkey has a degree. Unemployed people are morons. That’s Nightly News for this evening.”

In my experience, “there’s a lot less unemployment than there used to be” translates into “there are a lot more Taco Bells than there used to be.” There are hundreds of job opportunities, as long as you’re willing to make $6000 a year. I am not. Yet.

In fact, I have snagged a couple jobs in the past few months. I was in line for a reporting job at the Suburban Journal; all I had to do was spend the next year living in Hillbillytown, going to Hillbillytown Council meetings and turning them into fifteen stories a week (all of which would be printed, I was told, no matter how bad they were). Before that, I was hired as a retail ninja; I was told we’d go into Wal-Marts under cover of darkness with counting machines, doing inventory on the entire store, only to vanish without a trace before the store opened. It certainly sounded sexy, but it just didn’t scream “advancement opportunity.” Actually, it screamed “den of vampires.”

I’m not a careerist or anything; I’m not working my way up to the big corner office with the huge picturesque view. For rent and grocery money, I would do all my work sitting on a little wooden box. With nails sticking out of it. Under train tracks. That drip acid on me. For the rest of my life, no questions asked. All I want is enough money for a small apartment, food, an occasional night out, and an almost constant stream of unnecessary trinkets.

I should probably mention that my mom tries to prevent me from reading the “Help Wanted” ads. Given my luck so far, she has come to the conclusion that I’m not actually sending out resumes. After all, how could I be sending out resumes all this time and still not have a job? Why, the job market’s the best it’s been in years. Tom Brokaw says so! So obviously, according to my mom’s thinking, I must just be pretending to send out resumes so that I can continue having the fun of telling people I live with my parents. As a result, she takes the ads immediately and reads them aloud to me in an attempt to make my head explode. If she is unfamiliar with a word in an ad, she will skip the word. Words she often skips include “doctorate” and “custodial.” You can see how helpful this is.

And Dad? Well… he really needs to keep in mind that, someday, it will be my job to pick his nursing home. I’ll leave it at that for now.

Believe it or not, I actually feel pretty positive about things right now. Despite the above complications, I have a pretty decent life. I’m not sick; I have great friends and a great girlfriend; and legally, my parents have to love me even when I tell them to kiss off. I’m optimistic about jobs (still). Most importantly, I can look forward to the day when all my friends go back to school… and I don’t. Long live graduation.