I'm writing this from a coffee shop I used to frequent as an undergrad in Madison. I'm not big on school-spirit but I am a little susceptible to nostalgia and seeing the campus today while I was jogging definitely gives me that kind of heavy, ghostly feeling. I read a book a little while ago about pop music called Retromania and since then I've been kicking around the idea that the greatest trauma in life is realizing its ephemerality; the pain of never knowing quite where you are or what you have until it's gone and and you've moved beyond it. It's not a new idea but it's one that has become more visceral and painful as I've grown older. But maybe it's some "good-old-days" fallacy to which I'm falling victim. It might be because I'm not very old and have an immature grasp on things, weak concepts, bad ideas. The cafe I'm in is now run by students who've never met the people I'd known who'd worked here. I'm stung by the thought that life's responsibilities amount to a constant push against atrophy and entropy through the unflappable mince-step of minutes. A person is the habits they keep; what is a person but a person's life and what is a person's life but days stacking up? But I'm waxing platitudinal. It's been a year since I was last here, I miss it in a way but less so the city than the people in it who are mostly gone now. Madison has a way of making you feel old at 24 and I find the students walking around campus looking more to me like children. At the same time, I'm in the city to visit my grandparents who are turning 90 and 91 this weekend. My grandfather has been retired for over thirty years. They seem content to me, not irrevocably rent by the passage of time or obsessed with their own mortality, which if my theory were right, you would guess someone who is very old would be. Nostalgia is painful but not unpleasant, similar to running.
I passed through Memorial Library this afternoon. I went into the computer labs and the fourth floor reading room where I used to do the heavy lifting for my degree. While I looked out the bay windows of the fourth floor at the chipping spring waves on Lake Mendota and at the austere crenulations of the Red Gym, I felt oddly betrayed. Perhaps I'd been pig-headed to think that all of the time spent pouring over obscurities at those long tables was anything but time wasted. It was time though which, at the time, felt good, felt right. I was working on something I cared about and towards something I wanted. It was difficult work but it was good work and I'd assumed that after school, work would continue to be, at least to some extent, challenging and satisfying. What I realize now is that opportunities to do good work take an enormous amount of work to find and a good amount of luck to have a chance to participate in. But I loved my time in school and value highly what I learned. I am who I am because of those classes, many of which changed how I think on a scale that can only be described as seismic. My stepmother, my dad's wife, however, relishes pointing out that my brother (an engineering major) is working towards a "useful" degree which will get him a job which is "what's important." I usually fill in the "unlike your feckless brother who's pissed away five years of his life and a pile of our cash," though I might be projecting. I can't help but think back to the little jokes on how unemployable someone with a pure liberal arts education is. I had always thought if I was a successful student, I would be successful finding work -- that hard work then, even in something like epistemology would pay off somehow (I tried to explain exactly what epistemology was to my uncle yesterday and the topic was off-handedly dismissed). Maybe my time right now is a casualty of the growing pains of an antiquated system. Or perhaps, like my friend Simon says, no one in the middle class should ever really have had the opportunity to verse themselves in the liberal arts; it used to be a purely aristocratic pursuit and literature is and always was a means of personal enrichment for the well-to-do. But I'm speculating again and Simon does love fiction that deals with the upper-crust...
What has been unnerving about my visit and what may be one of the hardest parts of being unemployed is the pity. It's a terrible feeling to know that you are being pitied, it's something I've never really felt and it's far too real. I realized I was being pitied by my grandmother after I'd arrived in Madison last night. We had a conversation in which she referred to this phase in my life as a "bump." I always thought of divorces as pitiable "bumps," car accidents, deaths and addictions; to hear the word come from my grandmother about me, made me want to cry. The rest of my relatives behaved very strangely toward me as well. I take umbrage with my dad for telling them about my employment predicament*. It's not really any of their business and being thought of as my father's "troubled son" is neither helpful nor accurate, but as I sat down to eat with everyone, I couldn't help feeling like that's exactly what I was to them.
After my visit with my grandparents who are in enviable spirits and health, I went to a bar to meet John, a close friend of mine, and his girlfriend Jane (a combination of names with a pleasant alliterative flow, don't you think?). John is in med school and some of his classmates had put together a band that was playing a show. The band was terrible but considering their future day jobs, they can afford to be bad. Jane is currently employed at the Childrens Museum in Madison. She too was a liberal arts major; she studied journalism and mass-com. We drank some had a conversation about the dearth of viable employment in our desired fields (I told her I was recently laid off again though it's something I generally try to avoid leading with in a conversation; the title "unemployed" comes with no small amount of shame). The J School at Madison is competitive, you have you apply to get in and maintain a minimum GPA to stay in. Jane was a successful student but since graduation the closest she's come to working in her field is an unpaid internship at Madison's public radio station. It was relieving to talk to her about shared frustrations. She lamented the death of print journalism and how unclear it was that the labor market was so weak and what that meant when she decided to follow a comprehensive and expensive path into the field. Maybe twenty years ago a journalism degree was as apt to get someone a job as an engineering degree is today but I don't know. All I know is that now, many people like Jane and I are left basically singing the same tune, various versions of the liberal arts blues (I knew I'd shoehorn the title in here somewhere!).
After the mediocre band comprised of very smart people finished playing, the three of us went to a second bar to meet some old friends and acquaintances. The prodigious amount of beer I'd drank by then had begun to assuage the malaise that my family had left me in but finding the crew of old friends, not seen for some time, all variously employed in engineering, med school and law school gave me a new twinge of ambivalence. I'm happy for the continuing successes of all of my friends but comparisons are inevitable and often hurtful. And if the students I saw on the street looked like children, my old friends looked startlingly like men. By the end of the night -- though I was very happy to have seen everyone -- I was feeling a bit small (I also played pool and played very badly). I was ill at ease and restive and as I thrashed in my sleeping bag on John's floor, the conversation I'd had with my grandmother repeating itself in my mind. I contemplated just leaving town in the morning least be faced with the humiliation of pity all over again during the next day's birthday celebrations. If I left I wouldn't have to be confronted with the fact that, contrary to how I feel, my family thinks all I'm capable of is wasting time.
PS* While I was standing in the shower today, I realized I was the one who blurted out, upon my arrival in Madison that I no longer had a job. I told my grandparents I'd lost my job over dinner my first evening there. I think they asked how the job was going and I said something like "it's gone." I apologize for the mistake, no umbrage taken towards you, Dad.
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