For the first time in my life I felt old. Not like an, “Oh, I’m hanging out with sophomores,” kind of way, but more like a “Sweet Jesus, what I am I doing with my life?” kind of way. I was at a party last Saturday, and let me tell you, it was epic. Epic in the sort of way where you open the front door and a nauseating wave of stale sweat, warm beer and overbearing perfume hits you in the face like an overhand right from Riddick. Epic in the sense that a keg and a four-gallon tank of jungle juice were disposed of within an hour. Epic in the way that people were grinding in the living room hard enough to repave Alder Street. This party was so courageously epic that people were shamelessly Water Boarding me with PBR. And I felt old. I gagged on the stench of the house, napped through the entire consumption of the keg and jungle juice, and I choked on the normally welcome flood of warm Pabst.
As I aimlessly meandered through at least a hundred drunk, horny people in a house known as the Lounge, a lot of things occurred to me that I had never previously realized. Let me start by saying this: Like many of you out there, I am a socially late bloomer in a lot of aspects. I never partied in high school; I didn’t party my first two years of college; and I just didn’t transition well from high school to college, socially. But this was my life for about three years, with an extensive detour into an unpleasant binge last year that led me to what is commonly known as “rock bottom.”
In January, my long-term special lady and I broke up. She graduated from her school and felt the need to immediately join the workforce – in Chicago. “Well, peace,” I said. What could I say? I couldn’t tell someone to not get a job, not start a career, and not follow her dreams regardless of how stupid I felt the decision was. But she was over partying in the traditional college fashion, while I was still engulfed by it. But she was also a girl who partied as hard as I do now as a high school freshman; she had a lot of notches on her party belt. She understandably was over the constant debauchery of college partying, and genuinely wanted to start a new life in the “real world.” For this, I guess I can’t knock her.
Here’s what I realized during the Lounge party about the real world: It sucks. All it means is that you become a slave to a terrible job (no matter how much you convince yourself you love it), go to bed before the Daily Show and Colbert, and maybe have a good time when the weekend comes – if you’re not too tired. And what do you have to show for it? A huge plasma television, some nice carpet and an inane life sponsored by ExtenZe. Is this really what we’re preparing ourselves for when college ends?
The fact that people refer to a soulless life that revolves around a desk job ensuring the efficiency of a semi-truck’s delivery route as the “real world,” is unquestionably insane. I’m graduating this term, and I’m poor, in debt and chose to pursue one of the lowest paying careers in existence as a writer. But you know what? I’m OK with that because I’m going to spend my summer in Alaska and possibly Germany with my closest friends, for absolutely no reason other than to experience it, and even a dishwashing job will pay the bills. I know we need people to man those cubicles, print those TPS reports, and pin clever Far Side and Dilbert comics around the office, but it doesn’t have to be you.
This and more is what rolled through my head at the Lounge party. I thought about how I have been to a million parties just like this. I understood how my ex-special lady was justifiably burnt out on college. I thought about how a job where I read spreadsheets and monitor “hot loads” – this is a real, technical term – is the worst possible life I could ever dream for myself. I thought about how meeting a woman in this putrid atmosphere is not necessarily how I would want to meet her. But mostly, I thought about how everyone seemed to be enjoying the party for what it was: an epic that would guarantee everyone a drunken and probably regretful hookup if they thoroughly sought it. I realized that at one end of the tunnel there’s a life of parties just like this, and at the other end there’s the impending doom of this alleged “real world.” It really comes down to the fact that neither is permanently desirable, but the “real world” is what you make of it. And if you want my advice, life in a box, in an office, in a skyscraper or a comfortably sterile apartment is not the real world.
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