bowl-o-blau

TL;DR

Post-grad life is a weird limbo. 

You’re frantically assembling fragments of a 10-page research paper during finals week of your last quarter in academia, then suddenly, you’re in your pajamas trying to think of clever YouTube video comments. You’d watch some random video blog, slide back in your chair and stroke your chin, and then after a long while, you finally think to yourself:

“Wait… what the fuck am I doing?”

There’s certain facets of college life that I sorely miss. One of them is the way a certain 70 year-old poetry professor read Ginsberg’s Howl:

“… with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls…”

I remember him reading the line with that slow, steady, monotonous drawl of his, but then he’d have this deliberate and cacophonic emphasis on “cock” and “balls.” The imagery would jump out at you as you picture a potato-sized crotch in black biker shorts: its this large, disturbing, car-wreck of a mass that demands your attention. And yet, at the same time, its also oddly amusing. You don’t expect to hear a 70 year-old professor say those words in that particular syntax. Its a weird Rorschach test: the black blotch — this crotch that’s been awkwardly crammed in a small pair of biker shorts — is something that you know is supposed to be “cock” and/or “balls,” but it looks like a tiny garbage bag filled with doorknobs, balls of wadded paper, and moldy avocados.

But anyways, that’s how I would describe the cadence of the post-grad life: endless balls. Most people see it as a welcome reprieve from the hectic day-to-day of studying and exams and libraries and books and professors and students and reading and writing and lectures and papers and projects and presentations and meetings and classrooms and schedules… but to me, it doesn’t seem like there’s much charm to it — its sort of this weird, barren, uninviting landscape that extends far beyond the horizon. You’re not really hiking towards a peak, you’re kind of just sifting through nondescript mounds of job offers, practice exams, and all of the random crap that fills your days. You’re incredibly busy, and yet it seems like you didn’t really go anywhere.

It feels like a bookmark placed at a boring chapter within an otherwise wholly entertaining detective novel: you want to keep reading, but you’re sort of just stuck at this particular page. You think about skipping a few pages or skimming it for awhile, but you just know that there’s going to be something significant that you’re going to miss. What winds up happening is that you simply leave the bookmark where its at, and the novel just lies on your desk as it silently but boldly mocks you.

So this is me, whisper-yelling at this book:

“I’m gonna read you, biiiotch!”

A new series of blog posts starts soon… stay tuned.