It's getting weird seeing all the posts on Facebook and Twitter about finals, about people going home for the summer, about people GRADUATING. My brother is home for the summer, looking for cars to drive to the job he's got set up, and my middle sister is in the throes of AP exams, put in her enrollment deposit to ST. OLAF (fram fram!) and is looking forward to graduating in about a month.
Meanwhile, my parents and Asha are looking at this huge house and thinking how empty it will be in a few months, with the two middle kids away at school and me (fingers crossed) in my own apartment somewhere in the city.
My friends, the ones I graduated with, are feeling the ends of their one-year commitments closing in on them, issuing ultimatums and maydays about the long-awaited "rest of our lives." They are frantically scouring Craigslist for plausible careers, submitting resumes and cover letters and wondering what they really want to be doing with their time. It's throwing into pretty sharp relief the fact that I am no longer a student (and perhaps nevermore) and that I have in fact been a graduate for almost an entire year now, and I have worked in my current position for more than 8 months. My story has taken a different turn. Maybe we're onto a sequel now.
This is making me think about the passage of time. It seemed to take awhile to hit 6 months, but after that the months just fell like dominoes behind me. Just as I start feeling tired because it's Tuesday, I'm playing Loverboy's Working for the Weekend on repeat and putting in my last posts on Friday afternoon.
Kristy and I measure the passage of time by Tuesdays and Thursdays and girls' nights. We always laugh because when someone asks what day it is, Kristy looks at her watch, and I use relativity to figure out what day of the week it is, and then which week it is. "Well, two days ago we went to yoga, and last week you were in Chicago, which is the week my parents went to Boston to pick up my brother..." But looking back, the days and nights and big events and boring afternoons and the mornings I didn't think I'd make it through all melt together into this blurry, psychedelic GIF that is my life.
Between the two of us I think we create a pretty workable narrative.
I'm picking up the storyline now of this blog, of my life as a post-grad. I'm picking up this meta-story from December 27, when I talked about the storyline of the history of fruitcake.
Here's a story I like, about watches making their way back into fashion after being shut out by the cell phone revolution. I like it because it's tangible. It's built out of images. It pulls in history, economics, fashion, practicality.
It's essentially about hipsters. I am haughty of hipsterdom, but I will be the first to admit that it's all a ruse because, in fact, I am the Worst of the Hipsters.
Also, the composite storyline is the reason I am so obsessing over public radio these days. The long reports and interviews, the multiple subjective insights they reap over the course of days, weeks, or months digging into the same story.
I value this storytelling style as a counterpoint and a complement to the flash news we get as we go through the day. To be fair, our brains really have an incredible capacity to process information. Part of the reason we are able to take in so much is the fact that people make snap judgments that are completely and unavoidably subjective. Sam McNerney (a classmate of a friend of mine) writes this often mentally-straining but always jaw-dropping psych blog. In a post I read today, The Irrationality of Irrationality, connects subjectivity to the narrative in the passage below:
...In the process, hooking up my inner anthropologist to my inner writer for some serious intellectual fireworks.
Anyway, McNerney first raises our hackles and guilts us into recognizing our inevitable bias in every decision we make--and then promptly soothes our smarting egos with the assurance that "It’s natural for us to reduce the complexity of our rationality into convenient bite-sized ideas."
He wraps it all up with a warning: Take every new story as a new side to the same story, a new puzzle piece. Life in society is complex; court cases are complex; arguments and fights between friends and lovers are complex.
And what do I get out of this? Acknowledge your story. Own it. But let it change.
Meanwhile, my parents and Asha are looking at this huge house and thinking how empty it will be in a few months, with the two middle kids away at school and me (fingers crossed) in my own apartment somewhere in the city.
My friends, the ones I graduated with, are feeling the ends of their one-year commitments closing in on them, issuing ultimatums and maydays about the long-awaited "rest of our lives." They are frantically scouring Craigslist for plausible careers, submitting resumes and cover letters and wondering what they really want to be doing with their time. It's throwing into pretty sharp relief the fact that I am no longer a student (and perhaps nevermore) and that I have in fact been a graduate for almost an entire year now, and I have worked in my current position for more than 8 months. My story has taken a different turn. Maybe we're onto a sequel now.
This is making me think about the passage of time. It seemed to take awhile to hit 6 months, but after that the months just fell like dominoes behind me. Just as I start feeling tired because it's Tuesday, I'm playing Loverboy's Working for the Weekend on repeat and putting in my last posts on Friday afternoon.
Kristy and I measure the passage of time by Tuesdays and Thursdays and girls' nights. We always laugh because when someone asks what day it is, Kristy looks at her watch, and I use relativity to figure out what day of the week it is, and then which week it is. "Well, two days ago we went to yoga, and last week you were in Chicago, which is the week my parents went to Boston to pick up my brother..." But looking back, the days and nights and big events and boring afternoons and the mornings I didn't think I'd make it through all melt together into this blurry, psychedelic GIF that is my life.
Between the two of us I think we create a pretty workable narrative.
I'm picking up the storyline now of this blog, of my life as a post-grad. I'm picking up this meta-story from December 27, when I talked about the storyline of the history of fruitcake.
Here's a story I like, about watches making their way back into fashion after being shut out by the cell phone revolution. I like it because it's tangible. It's built out of images. It pulls in history, economics, fashion, practicality.
It's essentially about hipsters. I am haughty of hipsterdom, but I will be the first to admit that it's all a ruse because, in fact, I am the Worst of the Hipsters.
Also, the composite storyline is the reason I am so obsessing over public radio these days. The long reports and interviews, the multiple subjective insights they reap over the course of days, weeks, or months digging into the same story.
I value this storytelling style as a counterpoint and a complement to the flash news we get as we go through the day. To be fair, our brains really have an incredible capacity to process information. Part of the reason we are able to take in so much is the fact that people make snap judgments that are completely and unavoidably subjective. Sam McNerney (a classmate of a friend of mine) writes this often mentally-straining but always jaw-dropping psych blog. In a post I read today, The Irrationality of Irrationality, connects subjectivity to the narrative in the passage below:
[M]ental shortcuts are necessary because they lessen the cognitive load and help us organize the world – we would be overwhelmed if we were truly rational.
This is one of the reasons we humans love narratives; they summarize the important information in a form that’s familiar and easy to digest. It’s much easier to understand events in the world as instances of good versus evil, or any one of the seven story types.
...In the process, hooking up my inner anthropologist to my inner writer for some serious intellectual fireworks.
Anyway, McNerney first raises our hackles and guilts us into recognizing our inevitable bias in every decision we make--and then promptly soothes our smarting egos with the assurance that "It’s natural for us to reduce the complexity of our rationality into convenient bite-sized ideas."
He wraps it all up with a warning: Take every new story as a new side to the same story, a new puzzle piece. Life in society is complex; court cases are complex; arguments and fights between friends and lovers are complex.
And what do I get out of this? Acknowledge your story. Own it. But let it change.
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