It never ends.

About two months ago, I was talking to a few friends. One said she was afraid of the fact that she and a close guy friend had romantic feelings for each other because she was afraid of ruining their friendship, and even though it sounds corny, she can't imagine not having him in her life.

I told her that I hate that reason for not giving it a shot because 1) If it doesn't work out, you truly can still be friends if you BOTH want it enough, and 2) There are people that we think we can't live without. And then something happens and we find out, we can live without them. Life goes on.

I fully believe that.

I do, however, also believe in something I wrote four months ago:

You never really "get over" losing someone you love. You just learn how to accept it and turn it into something else. And if you loved them, you never really lose them, because they've had an impact on you--they've made a difference in your life and it's a part of you. The pain just mellows out.

It's funny. I was thinking before about the day in Venice when we went to the Universita Ca' Foscari and heard Kathy's friend Shaul lecture about the Venetian ghetto and The Merchant of Venice. After that, we took the vaporetto up from Dorsoduro to Cannaregio and had lunch in a cafeteria and then walked down to the old apartments that used to constitute the ghetto. During lunch, I somehow got to talking to Kathy about "intellectual alienation," as she called it, and we continued talking about it the rest of the day. I don't even really remember what we said, but I do remember that she emphasized to me: the struggle never ends.

I remember exclaiming to her that that was terribly depressing to hear. She shrugged, and told me very earnestly that it's true: she's been struggling with it her whole life, and even now, she still does.

She told me that nearly one year ago, to the day. In the past year, I've found myself oscillating between contentment and hopefulness, and despair and frustration, fairly evenly. When I came back from Venice, I was still pretty high. By July/August, I was falling hard and fast. September, I started getting better again. Pretty mellow for the most part, aside from some moments, through the fall. Winter break I went nuts, and it was even worse when I got back. I started looking up in March, and after Relay, I was pretty content all through April, though tormented by other things. Now I'm back home and frustrated and angry and feeling this dull ache all the time again. I'm trying to embrace it and channel it toward something productive, but sort of failing so far.

In a strange way, this past semester has kind of mimicked the second half of my junior year of high school. All of that year was pretty great, but the second half was just so crammed full of new friends, old friends, adjusted relationships, and crazy emotions, that the first two and a half years of high school are barely memorable by comparison. I can distinctly recall vivid, isolated incidences from those six months, while the two and a half years before that seem like a blur. That's how I feel about this past semester--as though I have lived more in the past five months than I did the two and a half years before that.

I wrote in my journal a lot at the end of junior year. I journaled a lot this semester. Mmm.

Well, I just hope senior year of college is a lot better than senior year of high school. Well...less painful. I don't know if I could go through that again. Although, isn't that what life is--fearing pain, taking a chance and living anyway, getting the shit kicked out of you, and then finding the strength to get back up again?

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Now playing: Vampire Weekend - Oxford Comma

GET ANGRY

Buff: Yo man, you're getting me all upset here.
Jeff: You should get upset! Everyone should get upset... It's my duty as a human being to get pissed off. Not that it makes any difference in the first place. Nothing ever fucking changes... It's all so fucking futile!
Tim: If it's all so fucking futile what the fuck are you so fucking upset about, fuckhead?
Jeff: I'm fucking alienated.
Buff: Me, too! I'm alienated, too. But at least there's Oreos.


...I don't even really like Oreos.

Too much perspective? (Even this is too long still.)

Sometimes I feel like I see everything from so many different angles that I don't know which one is the one I believe in the most. I think I have this fear of being too absolute, too extreme, too single-minded. There's something to be said for stability and more to be said for permanence and legacy, but I like transience, too. I like being able to change my mind. To me, seeing anything as absolute is a trap and it hinders growth, it stops you from being able to learn and grow. I like being flexible and I like the fluidity of being open to multiple possibilities. I often don't like having to choose one way or another when I relate to both. I prefer to evaluate case by case, and not choose a blanket answer that is intended to encompass everything.

I'm in between about a lot of things, and sometimes I worry that I don't have definite, assertive opinions or beliefs of my own. I know I do. I just also know that it's not important to me to have absolute opinions on a lot of things, and I know I feel different ways at different times in different situations. I don't like feeling chained to one concrete belief. I don't like the feeling of being trapped that accompanies that. I like feeling free. I don't like narrowness.

Or maybe it's that I don't like broadness? I mean, I hate it when someone asks me if I'm pro-life or pro-choice. I don't think it's that simple. I understand logically and emotionally both sides of the argument. Sure, it's ethically shady, but I also think it's wrong for a baby to be born into a world that doesn't want it, where it will only be abused and mistreated. In that way it's cruel. At the same time, I'm usually an "everything happens for a reason" kind of a gal, and messing around with a potential life isn't something I think I'd ever consider. But my life is a piece of cake. I don't have to endure extreme adversity and it's easy for me to believe in some kind of fate. It's not like I'm a fourteen-year-old rape victim who's pregnant by her attacker or something. If I were, I don't know how I'd feel. I can't say. So I generally say that I think a woman should have the right to choose, but I also think most women shouldn't choose abortion. Even that's simplifying it more than I'd like.

I can choose to see things the way I want to. I can choose to see people as a bunch of foolish, ignorant jerks who are going to lead to the demise of all humanity, or I can see them as the last pillar supporting humanity from crumbling. I can be cynical and realistic or romantic and idealistic. It's not just that I can be these things--I generally feel like I am all these things. I'm sarcastic and cynical and pessimistic by turns, but eternally hopeful and idealistic at the same time. I want to see the best in people but often, they just show their worst. Being optimistic and idealistic can translate into naivete, though--like Gatsby or The Quiet American--and I don't want that, either. I see it sometimes in others and I know I know better than to have blind faith in people; I'll just end up painfully disillusioned if I do.

I go back and forth between the two outlooks all the time. I can try to be one way or another but I don't like doing that, because that's not me. As I told someone last night, I just am what I am, and that happens to be a lot of different things at different times. I hate it when people make me feel like that's wrong, like things have to be black and white, one way or another. Like I'm wrong for seeing things so many ways and relating to them all. There's a lot that I don't understand, that I can't relate to, that I can't imagine, that I disagree with. But I love it when I meet someone who is able to explain the unimaginable to me in a way that I can understand. Without being open to other perspectives and trying to identify with others, how could you understand anything?

I also decided today that I don't like it when I feel like I have to "try" to be myself around people. I don't like pandering and I don't like compromising myself, even though intrinsically I like making people happy, and there's a lot of things I don't mind doing or just don't care about that I'm willing to compromise on, if it'll make others happy. I hate it when I realize that I'm acting in a way I don't like around certain people, because then I have to make an effort to be myself and not to let them bring out this behavior that doesn't feel like my own. It's just not that frequently that I find people that I feel comfortable being myself around. I hide a lot, even though I know I shouldn't--that's just how I am. I suppose it's because I know there's so much that's contradictory about myself that I don't let myself show that unless I feel like a person will understand that I'm not being overtly, obnoxiously hypocritical or mockingly facetious and arrogant. I suppose. I don't know.

People close to me are always telling me to speak up more, or be more assertive, and stuff like that, but I like flying below the radar. Sometimes other people will tell me I'm the kind of person that doesn't say much, but when I do say something, others listen because it'll be good. I don't think this is necessarily true. Often when I do speak up, people still talk over me or just don't listen. I'm also quiet a lot of the time, though, because I don't have anything to say about the topic at hand. If I don't have anything to say, it's probably because 1) I don't have a definitive opinion or 2) one of my biggest pet peeves is people who talk pompously about things they know nothing about. You want to talk about how Michael Phelps smoked pot? Congratulations, talk away. I don't really have anything to say about it, other than I think it's been blown way out of proportion. You want to talk about philosophy or music theory? Awesome. I'll listen, and I'll be interested. But I'm not going to tell you what I think of Plato's Republic, and I'm not going to argue you when you say Beethoven is better than Mozart, because I wouldn't have a bloody clue as to what I was talking about. I know who Plato is. I listen to Beethoven and Mozart's works. But I'm not going to pretend I am anything more than vaguely familiar with them in a very rudimentary way. I'm not going to bullshit about it. But if you want to recommend a piece to listen to and explain why you like it and what I should listen for, then fantastic.

And if you want to talk about the injustice of the admissions process at tier one colleges and universities, or modern American playwrights, or why TV news programs make me angry, or pretty much anything I write about on here, then just try and get me to STOP talking. But who wants to have a conversation about any of that? Hell, that's one of the main reasons I write so much on this stupid thing--who wants to ponder all this shit with me. Hahaha. Someone told me the other day that I should write a screenplay, and I asked what should I write about? They asked me in return, "Well, what do you have to say?" I said not a heck of a lot, but that was a silly untruth, and I didn't realize it until later on. I have a lot to say--I just can't always find ways to say it, let alone creative ways, or people who care to hear me. That's how it finds its way here. Which isn't exactly an awful thing. I'd hate it if I had absolutely nothing to say about anything ever.

I realized one of my problems when thinking about the "Future" is not that I don't know what I want to do--there's just way too many things that I want to do, and I can't make myself pick just one. I can't shut out everything else to specialize on one thing. I keep telling myself that I'm better off for picking one thing and learning a lot about it than knowing a shallow amount about a lot of things, but I don't feel like anything works like that. Everything's interdisciplinary, especially in the arts. Everything overlaps. There is no one single field. Even my specialized classes overlap. Everything in both my majors intersects all the time. And I know I mention this all the freakin time, but it's true. And I don't want to pick just one thing to focus on. I don't want to end up cornered into one field. Even though I sort of know in the back of my mind that that will never happen. And I don't want my voice to be any more limited than it already is. Which is quite a lot.

Meh. Too much thinking.

"Just doing my civic duty, sir."

So last week for American Government, I read two passages. One was by a man named Robert Putnam, who proposes that there is a direct link between "social capital" and "civic engagement," and government performance. Social capital is "features of social organizations such as networks, norms, and social trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit." Basically, it's all the good stuff that comes out of actively participating in social communities, whether it's a church group, a labor union, the PTA, the League of Women Voters, bowling leagues, the Elks, Boy Scouts, or the Red Cross. Being involved with one of these groups is "civic engagement," and according to Putnam, the more "civic engagement," the higher the voter turnout, and the better the performance of the government.

The other part of Putnam's theory is that civic engagement and thus social capital has been in decline since the 1960s and '70s. Membership in organizations like those mentioned has decreased significantly, and though membership in other new organizations, like the Sierra Club or AARP, is high, membership does not require direct activity. "Their ties, in short, are to common symbols, common leaders, and perhaps common ideals, but not to one another." There is no social trust, and there is little sense of community or connectedness.

Putnam attributes this decline to changes in women's roles in the community, changes in the economy, changes in residential stability, and changes in technology and entertainment. There is less "neighborliness" among Americans, and they are less trusting in general. Women are now a substantial part of the labor force, people move around a lot, the economy has increased in scale and community-based businesses have largely been replaced by franchises and corporations, and people spend their leisure time in isolated activities. People play on computers, watch television shows and movies, play video games - all of these things are so simple to do alone. Even listening to music is now a personal activity - instead of gathering around a record player to listen to the latest single, people listen to their MP3 players and iPods.

I found this interesting because of a book I read a few years ago by two men, William Strauss and Neil Howe. They suggest that American history can be seen as a series of generations, and each generation fits one of four types. American history, then, is a repetition of cycles that consist of these four types: Idealist, Reactive, Civic, and Adaptive. Each generation of a particular type shares characteristics and traits. Each life stage of a generation is about 22 years: youth, rising adulthood, midlife, and elder life. Idealist and Civic generations are dominant, while Reactive and Adaptive generations are recessive. Each generation lives through social moments: secular crises and spiritual awakenings. Dominant generations come of age and enter rising adulthood during a social moment, exerting greater influence on the public world, while recessive generations' first social moment is as a child, influencing the private world more.

It makes a lot more sense when put in practice. The whole thing seems like it tailors history to fit the pattern, rather than history happening to fit the pattern. Example: the most recent cycle to be completed fully was the Great Power cycle: the Missionary Generation, the Lost Generation, the G.I. Generation, and the Silent Generation. They lived through the Missionary Awakening (the "3rd Great Awakening" that prompted agrarian and labor protests, muckraking journalists, and progressive and socialist movements in the early 20th century) and the Great Depression/WWII Crisis. After them came the Millennial Cycle, which we're in now.

First came the Boomers (1943-1960). They were rising adults during the Boom Awakening, 1967-1980. Woodstock, Kent State, Vietnam, Age of Aquarius, Earth Day - radical cultural change going on here. Lots of self-interest here. There's a funny bit in this movie, I Could Never Be Your Woman, in which Mother Nature rants about how humans were grateful to be at the top of the food chain until the Baby Boomers, who "thought they could just breeze through life doing whatever the hell they wanted" - the men didn't go to war when they were supposed to, the women didn't have kids when they were supposed to, they became materialistic and didn't care about the environment at all. Hehe. So anyway, after them is the 13ers, 1961-1981, who grew up seeing the adults screw up the country (Vietnam, Iran, all that). They're The Breakfast Club and the Brat Pack in general - adults are against them and life doesn't hold much for them. Pessimistic and realistic by turns. Adults call them disappointing; 13ers themselves say they are what they have to be to get by.

Then, 1982 to about 2000 or so are the Millennials - us. We're predicted to be a Civic generation that comes of age during what is still an unknown crisis and is in elderhood during the next spiritual awakening. The book I have was written in '91. It predicts that 1991-2003 sees more regulation, "public intrusions into what others will consider matters of personal and business privacy," anti-drug and pro-environment lobbying, more pro-life movements, disdain for political party allegiances, increased materialism and attention to style and advertising, clean-cut and overprotected kids, and revitalized civic organizations for youth. 2004-2025 sees failure of Social Security and economic and social hardship. Depending on if the secular crisis turns out well or not, the Millennials could produce strong leaders and a greater sense of unity and solidarity than any other generation in recent history. If the crisis comes too early or unfolds poorly, then the Millennials will be a crippled generation, unable to do what the Idealist Boomers set for them. So say Howe and Strauss.

The whole theory really stretches the whole generation cycle deal to work. One cycle actually doesn't have an adaptive generation, which they explain away somehow, I forget exactly how. But if they're right, then our generation now is a civic, and we're going to reverse the trend of low civic engagement.

The other article I read for American Government is by Scott Keeter, who says that the youngest cohort of voters is currently showing signs of being more politically active and aware, much like their Boomer parents were in the '60s and '70s. Keeter calls us the "DotNets," though, and says we are active in community work and attempt to make our voices heard - we're not hesitant in expressing ourselves. If the voting trend continues in the direction it was headed from last election, there should be a higher turnout of 18-29 year-olds: in 2004, the percentage of voter turnout for that cohort increased 9 percentage points.

I know that that was a really roundabout way of making my point, but I wonder if Keeter's research shows that Howe and Strauss's theory is correct in this case. And if it is, what's our secular crisis going to be? Or, did it come early with 9/11 and the Iraq War and now the economic crisis and everything else that we're screwing up?

Something else that they said: the Boomers will be most influential and productive in their later years. They won't relinquish control early. Bush is a Boomer. But, Obama just misses being a Boomer by one year: he was born in 1961. And if McCain is elected...he'll be the first of the Silent Generation to be president. The G.I.'s produced 7 Presidents. The Silents, 0. The Boomers, just 1 so far. Obama would mean a 13er in office 12 years before the 13ers are projected to take over the White House.

Sarah Palin is a 13er too.

Somehow, I feel like no matter who's elected, things are not going to turn out well. Just a feeling.

I spent way too much time writing this instead of doing homework. Rawr.

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Now playing: Counting Crows f. Sheryl Crow - American Girls

'The Bridge of San Luis Rey' again

I posted two excerpts from the novel a while ago but never got around to writing about them. Well, now I finally am. In reverse order.

The second passage talks about death, memory, and love. Through Madre Maria, Wilder presents the idea that when a person dies, all that remains is the living's memories of him, but love transcends this to exist even when all memories of a person cease. I think that's such a difficult concept to embrace.

In that way, I can understand why someone might want to be famous. I can understand why someone would want to change the world dramatically, would want to do something that people will remember. It's easy to feel that once you die, if no one remembers you, it's almost as though you never existed. Frank Capra counters that with It's a Wonderful Life, showing how a person's life has probably influenced countless people and consequently has shaped the way things are, and without him, nothing would be the same. Still, though, we really have become a society that practically requires instant gratification - we like things to be tangible, we like to be able to see the fruits of our labors. I guess that's one of the many difficulties of love - it's not often present in such a physical sense.

And that leads me to the first passage, which talks about how passionate love is love in self-interest. Wilder pulls the Our Town trick - Our Town is surprising and unusual in that it paints a picture of mundane, unextraordinary life, and then shows how it's extraordinary and how you shouldn't take a moment of it for granted. Likewise, I found it unusual that a man of literary talent - genius, even - was arguing against passion. A writer. Giving a negative connotation to passion. To passion - the inspiration of so much great art. Except, he's right. To me, at least.

I was reading a pleasant novel by one Stephen King the other day, in which he writes that,

"True love, like any other strong and addicting drug, is boring--once the tale of encounter and discovery is told, kisses quickly grow stale and caresses tiresome . . . except, of course, to those who share the kisses, who give and take the caresses while every sound and color of the world seems to deepen and brighten around them. As with any other strong drug, true first love is really only interesting to those who have become its prisoners.

"And, as is true of any other strong and addicting drug, true first love is dangerous."

I'm inclined to agree with Sai King. (And apparently I'm inclined to pick up his phrases and dialect.) And having heard Sai Wilder's argument, I'm inclined to agree with him as well. Like King says, true love and especially true first love is a strong and addicting drug, and those bound by it are its prisoners. (Whether or not it feels like that while you're in it, that's something else. Either way, it's true, and it's impossible to know how difficult it is to not let it take over everything you are until you're in it. It sweeps you away. "Ka like a wind." But I digress.) True first love is also, like Wilder says, love as passion - and therefore, it's an expression of self-interest. It's fleeting and impermanent and unstable and exists for itself - not for others. To become what Wilder hints at is lasting, mature love, he say sit must pass "through a long servitude, through its own self-hatred, through mockery, through great doubts" before it can "take its place among the loyalties."

I Corinthians 13:4 sounds almost cliche to me by now, but I still like it. "Love is always patient and kind. It is never jealous. Love is never boastful or conceited. It is never rude or selfish. It does not take offense and is not resentful. Love takes no pleasure in other people's sins, but delights in the truth. It is always ready to excuse, to trust, to hope, and to endure whatever comes." If that's so, then love as passion - love in self-interest - cannot be pure love.

The wonderful Mrs. Smith taught us the three words the Greeks used for love: eros, agape, and philia - love as passion and attraction, a more general and mature love, and a sort of virtuous and platonic love. If I remember right, ideally, it is thought that a marriage should comprise all three. Eros is in self-interest, but I like what Wilder says - it can transform itself through a series of arduous motions to become agape.

In that passage, Wilder is describing a character named Camila, who was a beautiful and talented actress who suddenly abandoned her art and then fell ill and faded from public view. As he said, "she had never realized any love save love as passion." This reminded me of a book I read about the making of Rebel Without a Cause. It was a long, tumultuous process involving all sorts of problems and difficulties from before the script was even penned. Many of these were due to the director, Nick Ray. Near the end of the book, the writers talked about how much of Ray comes out in the film:

"In some ways, Ray was the Melville hero that actress Betsy Blair saw in him back in the days of her great Hollywood parties. He became his own Romantic figure, flinging himself recklessly through time, creating and destroying all along the way. He maintained an intense, self-dramatizing regard and respect for his feelings. If Rebel aches like kids ache, that's because Ray ached that way. He worked off his pain, struggled against authority and refused to 'mature' if that meant feeling less."

I love that. One one level, I pity him for never knowing mature love, but in some ways, I can't help but respect him for actually succeeding in that. "Refused to mature if that meant feeling less." Part of me would want that. I don't want to "mature" if it means growing numb. At the same time, I'd kind of welcome it. Feeling things intensely is exhausting. But what does it mean, to "mature" and grow numb and stop feeling so much? I feel like you lose something if you let yourself grow numb enough that you don't feel any more. Lester Burnham in American Beauty-style. You become more capable of getting through life without growing weary and cynical, but still. In theory, I'd rather be cynical and angry than indifferent. Indifference is poison to me. If that's what it means to mature, I think I'd rather not.

Don't hold me to that, though.

Counting Crows lyrics:

I don't want to feel so different

But I don't want to be insignificant and

I don't know how to see the same things different

Now...

Haha. Adam Duritz, the epitome of self-interest. I can sympathize mostly though, if not empathize. Reconciling the desire to not feel alienated and alone and all that angst-y teenage-y stuff, with the desire to not be the same as everyone else = not easy. (Excuse the split infinitives, please.)

I guess that's all. I gotta finish up my work for class in the a.m. anyway.

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Now playing: Jason Mraz - I'm Yours

Clarity.

So I don't have it on me, because I lent it to a friend, but I read recently a book by the film director David Lynch (Mulholland Dr., Eraserhead, etc.) about his film career and his fascination with transcendental meditation. In the second chapter (each is only a couple of pages long), he writes about the "Rubber Clown Suit":

When I started meditating, I was filled with anxieties and fears. I felt a sense of depression and anger.

I often took out this anger on my first wife. After I had been meditating for about two weeks, she came to me and said, “What is going on?” I was quiet for a moment. But finally I said, “What do you mean?” And she said, “This anger, where did it go?” And I hadn’t even realized that it had lifted.

I call that depression and anger the Suffocating Rubber Clown Suit of Negativity. It’s suffocating, and that rubber stinks. But once you start meditating and diving within, the clown suit starts to dissolve. You finally realize how putrid was the stink when it starts to go. Then, when it dissolves, you have freedom.

Anger and depression and sorrow are beautiful things in a story, but they’re like poison to the filmmaker or artist. They’re like a vise grip on creativity. If you’re in that grip, you can hardly get out of bed, much less experience the flow of creativity and ideas. You must have clarity to create. You have to be able to catch ideas.

There's more that I liked, but like I said, I don't have the book on me. He mentions something else about how he never was into drugs because that would ruin his clarity. It made me think how that's just another reason not to smoke, drink excessively, or use any other kind of substance. I want my work to be purely the result of my thoughts, not the result of an altered state of mind.

It also made me think of how we ruin the clarity of our experience of everything in life by hiding. There are so many things we hide behind, whether it's through substance use, a facade of toughness, fictional worlds, materialism, or fear. I suppose in some ways these things could heighten our experiences, but more than anything else, I think they lessen it. In excess, at least. In small doses, in moments, I guess they're merely isolated experiences in and of themselves. But if you make a habit of hiding behind these things, they become a way of life, and a way of cheapening life. If that makes any sense.

In that sense, part of me is determined to live with as much clarity as possible, as much strength as possible - embracing pain and fear instead of relying on something else to numb it, take it away, to dull it, to soften the blow. Because really, that's what all that stuff does. It makes it easier. And I guess in some ways, we have natural defenses to help us through life, and it's okay to rely on them when the going gets tough, but at the same time, I can't help feeling like I'd rather either fight or embrace everything that comes than try to make it go away without facing it. And hiding behind these things, that's not facing the pain. It's running away.

I'm fairly certain tomorrow I'll reread this and disagree with myself entirely. Well, maybe not entirely, but I think I'll feel differently. After all, "I know that night is not the same as the day: that all things are different, that the things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist, and the night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started." One of the two parts of A Farewell to Arms that I liked. Haha.

Speaking of literature. I'm presently finishing up Edward Albee's Three Tall Women, and it's absolutely fabulous, like everything I've ever read by him. I'll probably write more about it soon.

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Now playing: John Mayer - New Deep

Yum. Stewart's Orange n Cream soda. A bit o' heaven in a glass bottle.

I was just randomly wondering about something:

I feel like I know a lot of people who consider themselves to be relatively selfless. As in, they give a lot to others, put their loved ones before themselves, and always take on everyone else's problems with their own. And these people, not unlike myself, generally feel like they're the ones who always are catching everyone else when everyone else is falling, but then there's no one there to catch them.

If this is the case, then why don't we all catch each other?

Might be misguided late-night logic, but I'm failing to see how this doesn't work.

Oh wait. Unless some of those "selfless" people aren't as generous with themselves as they think. Mmm.

That's all.

Peck: We're just the gatekeepers, Cor, I'm telling ya...

...We're just the gatekeepers. We spend four years scaring you about college, and then when you go away, you realize, it's really not that bad - it's just like high school.
Me: No. You spend four years getting us excited for college, and then we go, and we're disappointed that it's just like high school.

Oh, the "wisdom" of Mr. Peck. What a nut.

Though I'm not quite as cynical as that conversation with Peck makes me sound (stop laughing!), I do always laugh when people go on and on about how "different" college is from high school. Especially the ones who insist that in college, cliques are nonexistent. False. "Drama" gets left in high school? More false.

I was talking to an old friend about the latest drama in a circle of people that I'm on the outside of now. He says to me, "Why are we even talking about this? This shouldn't even be brought up. Aren't we supposed to be hearing about GOOD things happening to people we know? New jobs, career choices, being in love, engagements, that sort of thing? Isn't that supposed to be starting now?"

That's what you'd think, isn't it? And I guess it used to be true. Back when people married younger, and undergraduate school meant more. These days, fewer couples marry right out of college, or right out of high school. And for a lot of jobs, where you earned your bachelors isn't nearly as important as where you got your graduate degree. It's strange, how the timeline shifted like that. Even more strange are the implications of that shift.

"It used to be that you came out of school, and you got married - those who were going to get married. But my peers are getting married in their early 30s, so now there's like this extra 10 years of that angst."
- Zach Braff

He makes a good point. It seems like teenage angst is no longer reserved just for teenagers. It's extending into our twenties - throughout college, and beyond. But why exactly is that? What is different about twenty-something year olds today than twenty, thirty, forty years ago? Since that angst is extending past our teens, has our rate of maturity decreased? And if it has, why has it? What separates our generation for those before us?

I think responsibility is a factor. How it's taught, how much is given. I feel like people often "grow up" when they are forced to - when they are dealt responsibility and must accept it. The concept can be taught, but I guess it's really a more hands-on thing. And with an increasing number of kids going to college, that's another four years that they delay entering the real world. Another four years where they only need to take limited responsibility for themselves. In theory, I guess college is, in part, supposed to teach you to take responsibility for yourself and your actions and whatnot, but it's really just another sheltered environment where, if you don't actively choose to accept your responsibilities, you can skate by. It's hard to actively make that decision, when the alternative is so convenient. Who really wants to be an adult, with responsibilities and obligations? I prefer the Peter Pan route.

And now I'm just rambling. Shutting up now.

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Now playing: Chris Ayer - We Are Birds