Struggle From Afar

I have been told by many that the Fall after your graduation from college is the strangest period of time you may ever experience. The summer may pass you by in it's normal fashion, a blur of trips or internships or jobs or reruns, much the way it always has. We are conditioned from an early age to enjoy the summer, to see it as our vacation time, our respite from school and it's routines. However, as August moves forward I find myself in the period of time in which I usually start to look forward to the beginning of the school year, with it's Target runs and uncomfortable conversations with people whose names you barely remember. This year, though, I'm looking to the future, and I have to say, I'm drawing a blank.

As my friends begin to peel off and start their lives being busy and important in New York (Hi Shaughnessy and Michael), or political and high profile in Washington D.C. (Hi Jon and Elyse!) or snowed in in Chicago (Hi Becca!), or off to Teach for America or save the amazon or perfect their Chinese or Texan, I myself remain here in Struggledelphia, lost in limbo.

Look, it's not that I don't have a plan for the fall, I do, and it's a good one, but more on that later. The truth is that I really think whatever I do now, whatever anyone my age in my situation is doing now, is really a kind of limbo, no matter how well planned it is. It's going to take a while for anything to equal or to feel like the security and stability of an academic setting. And perhaps that is okay, at least for a while. Perhaps security isn't the thing that we should be looking for, but rather instability, not a constant but a variable.

Yesterday I saw the play "Never the Sinner", John Logan's chilling and terrifying look at the relationship, crimes, and trial of Nathan Leopold Jr. and Richard Loeb. As I watched this superbly performed piece, another fabulous offering from the Maucking Bird Theater Company, I couldn't help but breathe a sigh of relief. Leopold and Loeb were freshmen in college when they murdered young Robert Franks because, in their own words "they could". Now, I'm not saying that academia necessarily drives people to murder, though, of course, I've never taken multi-variable calculus. But I am saying that, unstable as it might be, I'll take limbo for a little while. A change might do us all some good.