Guess what , kids? It's that time of year again! BACK TO SCHOOL! Every year at this time, we ask ourselves and everyone around us one very poignant question. "Where did summer go?" We've all successfully personified summer into our dear friend or lover who, the night before school starts, decides its had enough of our cut off shorts and late nights at the beach, packs its bags and leaves for Mexico. We're heartbroken and left stumped, looking around wildly for any explanation as to why summer may have deserted us. Did the past 3 months of sun bathing and whining about the heat mean NOTHING to summer? I really thought we had something special. But it's time to move forward into that next chapter of our year....ya know the one that smells like eraser marks and bus emissions.
However, this particular fall has actually caught me completely off guard. For the first time in my entire cognizant life, I will not be returning to school. Scanning those aisles of school supplies in Walmart that crop up like shanty towns somewhere around the much too premature second week of August has always evoked a nauseous feeling in the pit of my stomach. But this year as I felt the urge to buy a 50 pack of Bic pens and a Lisa Frank notebook, I realized that I really had no use for them. If I thought I knew metaphorical school supply panic before, I was sorely mistaken. You see, the day you graduate college, you most likely haven't slept in the past 3 weeks what with finals, packing, and saying goodbye the only way you know how...drinking yourself into a stupor on a Tuesday night at a bar named after a drunken farm animal with your friends. And so you return to the sanctuary of home nursing the bags under your eyes and your malnourished body after 4 years of a strict diet of Lean Pockets, toaster strudel, and tequila. A job??? Psh. You'll get one of those. You have two whole Bachelor degrees, Neil Young once said "Hi" to you, and your hair is extra shiny. No probs here.
Then after weeks of practically stalking employees on LinkedIn who work your dream job, scouring Monster.com, and therapeutically shopping your way into credit card debt, you realize this job hunt might kill you. Or get you a restraining order. And then come the interviews. The soul-sucking, bullshit-inducing questions like "tell me about a time you were a great leader", "how would your friends describe you?", "how do you feel about data entry slavery? Pro? Anti?" Which leads to greater questions within yourself like, What the hell am I doing with my life?, Should I just run away to Guatemala and cultivate cocoa beans? Where do cocoa beans grow? ....The bottom line is, though, you just want someone to like you and your shiny hair enough to pay you and your two degrees above the poverty line. Thank you for your kind offer, sir or ma'am, but I feel like that ditch on the West Side Highway off Canal St. is too much of a fixer upper for my real estate taste.
So fellow graduates, this beginning of fall, when you WOULD be headed back to school in that fluffy land of learning, you are instead back home fighting with your mom over when you will detonate the dog crap minefield called the back yard...and by the way, the pooper scooper is broken. This fall stirs a panic far more frightening than anything a 3 ring binder can induce. This fall marks the end of carefree, you-still-have-time summer. This fall means one thing: we are officially unemployed.
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