Last week I had the pleasure of attending both a Nas concert, and a Blues Traveler concert with some of my closest friends at Spirit Mountain Casino. I intended on seeing the latter with a slight “we’re laughing at you” mentality, but as it turned out, Blues Traveler was incredibly fun even though I can probably count the number of songs I recognized on one hand. Between the beers and the time spent recklessly spinning with my dear chums, I realized something totally profound about Blues Traveler, particularly frontman John Popper, one of the world’s all-time greatest harmonica players.
How obscure is it for someone – like Popper – to pick up a harmonica instead of a guitar, drums, trumpet or violin? That’d be like Kobe Bryant deciding he was going to be the league’s premier waterboy. Regardless, Popper decided harmonica was his route to mid-’90s rock star success, and I can’t applaud him enough for it. While surrounded by a mob of Blues Traveler’s middle-aged fan base, lightening struck my brain and jarred an idea loose: I can do literally anything I want with my life. If this guy decided to be the best harmonica player in the world, what is genuinely stopping me from becoming the most intensely badass LAPD SWAT lieutenant? What’s stopping me from being a hero story football player like Marky Mark in Invincible? Or a bar owner? Or an island café grillmaster?
You see, with college’s end nearing for many of us, the natural instinct is to panic and wonder what the next chapter will bring. I have a résumé prepped for a career in journalism, complete with a degree and real-world experience. I came into the UO with only the prospect of learning to write in mind, despite having a much stronger math and science background. I have the luxury and privilege to write for the Emerald and to you nice folk. But as the next chapter approaches, I’m not so sure I’m quite ready for that nine-to-five career I clearly resent. I am not ready to move on from college, and have my 20s die with it in a cubicle, dealing with people whom I will probably consider obnoxiously incompetent because trust me, I already got to experience them through many of the journalism school’s highly overrated classes and projects.
I say that now because I came to the UO intending to write. I sort of learned how to do that, and having vaguely learned what to expect from a typical journalism career, I can’t say that I’m stoked about it. Firstly, isn’t that the general expectation of a University, ensuring the youth of the nation are educated and excited for a world of work? Maybe I misinterpreted this whole college experience, but I’m not sure what to make of it in the end. Sure, I learned to write, and I’ll get a piece of paper signifying my ability to follow orders, but was it really worth the money? Probably not. But here’s the thing, at least I’ve got one more option under my belt for a career when this youthful idealism I cling to gets buried six feet under.
We all define success differently, and that is a fact. So if money and having lots of it is your end-all, be-all result, then you can probably ignore this next part. The best advice I ever received was from University professor Sam Holloway, but this was back in the day when he was my high school calculus teacher. He said, “If you know what you want to do with your life, do something else first.” Holloway is a model of this mentality, as he was a civil engineer, a math teacher, baseball coach, an international teacher in Prague and is now a business professor at the UO. Now, I personally can’t lead that kind of life because I quite frankly don’t work very hard, but the point is Holloway always said he knew he could find pleasure in teaching, and following his ivy league engineering degree and career in the field, he pursued what mattered to him most.
Well, if you’re anything like me, you’re not sure what exactly matters most. But here’s what I can tell you: You might be the next John Popper or Sam Holloway if you question that knee-jerk reaction leading you toward the pursuit of happiness. A few weeks previous, I wrote about avoiding the inevitable drone-in-cubicle lifestyle, and the best way to sidestep that is through fighting your instinct. You may want to run out and get new Ikea shit with your awesome low-wage salary, but remember that money can’t buy happiness, and the greatest accomplishment of all is knowing that you tried a little bit of everything from harmonica to bartending to writing to teaching and everywhere in between instead of settling for what you were trained for in college. Just because your degree says one thing, doesn’t mean you have to be it.
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