Existentialism, Dirt Cheap

(I wrote this post on June 16, 2008, about six months ago. I just rediscovered it, and decided to put it up, before it gets any older. Oh, Blogger, saving all my drafts - I love you so!

WARNING: The following post may contain trace amounts of whining, and jobless-college-graduate angst. Read at your own risk.)

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"Life. Don't talk to me about life."
- Marvin the Paranoid Android (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams)

"What I really lack is to be clear in my mind what I am to do, not what I am to know, except in so far as a certain knowledge must precede every action."
- Søren Kierkegaard

What does one type about in a blog, eh? I've had a blog of some form or another for years now, yet I don't believe I've quite got the hang of it. I'm starting to believe that perhaps worrying about this is, in itself, part of Missing The Point.

So I am, indeed, going to talk about life. After all, is this not a hallmark of my fledgling generation - the habit of laying bare everything for the entire world to see?

I am a college graduate, less than a month out of one of the most prestigious universities in the nation (I'm still wondering how I managed to sneak in!), and like so many other recent college graduates, I have not yet found a job.

It's not as if I didn't anticipate this uncomfortable scenario. I'd long realized I wanted to "create" - to write, to create art, to work on films - and I figured yes, but twenty billion other people would like to do the same thing, and a good percentage of those probably are getting degrees as we speak. Somehow, through hubris or - "something", I felt I had to be "different".

I chose to take a "unique" route through college; I designed my own course of study. I studied psychology, literature, anthropology, social theory, art, writing, ethnic/gender/queer studies... etcetera, etcetera. This selection of classes was chosen with the goal of finding out as much about how the world works - what makes people tick. I figured that would be my "edge".

So did it work?

(I left off the post here, amusingly enough. Since writing this, I've gained an excellent internship, but still no paying job. So, uh, we'll see, eh?)