I was walking home from work yesterday when it suddenly struck me.
This is the first week that I’ve officially been truly and utterly POST-GRAD.
What about the last three months? You ask. Why have you deceived us with the misleading title of your blog? Well, I should confess right now that I’ve kind of been cheating this summer. My summer associate program - 11 kids getting paid to go to public speaking workshops, Facebook outings, and bar hopping (okay, maybe not the last one)- doesn’t really count as real life post grad.
Now that that’s over and the other ten kids left Greenlining, I’m now in a real after-college setting: a rather predictable 9-5 job that doesn’t take me on field trips every day, and only a few friends sprinkled around the area.
How does that make me feel? Absolutely terrified. I feel like I’m the new kid in school, except my potential companions are Trader Joe’s shoppers, married and jaded thirty somethings at work, and gloomy bar patrons instead of students. This I-need-friends-now panic is triggering my aggressive freshman year instinct of needing to unnecessarily introduce myself to everyone I meet, except it’s ten times harder to find these potential friends now that they’re not all concentrated in a one mile radius and don’t exactly harbor a similar burning desire for friendship.
Potential friends are like precious jewels. When I find one, I get really excited and anxious and I try my hardest to seem cool and casual but then I fuck it up by being too direct because I don’t want them to slip away and I blurt out “we should be friends!!" and they get scared and slowly back away from my forwardness.
It’s a stressful environment to live in.
That’s why I’ve decided to leave it all behind to travel the world.
Elaboration: I spent the past five days roadtripping with a friend to the Northwest, and now I am completely obsessed with being in places anywhere other than here. Now I get why everyone that studies abroad won’t shut up about how great it was.
Because travel is liberation. In foreign cities, people will think you’re interesting by default. No one thinks you’re weird for aggressively pursuing new friends, because everyone is on the lookout for new friends while traveling. And you’ll probably meet the most interesting people along the way, because the most interesting people tend to seek out the most interesting experiences.
You can make fun of Canada with a British guy via South Park references, then make fun of the way he can’t say “literally”. You can belt Alicia Keys in a deserted alley with new friends at 3AM. You can repeatedly shout “YOU ARE SO COOL!” at a beautiful, half Indonesian neuroscience major straight female, and her reaction will be to buy you a drink (yes this happened). You can walk through a bar with your friend, identify the hottest guy, walk up to him, and explain that you want to make out with him because he’s the hottest guy AND THEN YOU DO IT.
I can’t exactly explain why these things don’t happen in real life. I guess because we’re all so set in our ways and don’t want to be spontaneous and we’re not really looking to meet new friends because we already have some at the table with us (and there’s no room for anyone to join, sorry!). On the other hand, travel encourages seizing of the moment. Travel makes us bold.
So okay, for the moment I’ll stay in Berkeley and try really hard to befriend people who aren’t looking for new friends. I’ll go to bars alone and smile at everyone in Trader Joe’s and maybe even online date if it comes to that.
But I’ll be saving my money so that come January, I can pack my suitcase and book my one way ticket out of here. Because now is the time to have all the experiences we want before adulthood kills us with responsibility and husbands and fire. Let’s go travel the planet, because it’s epic, it’s the time in our lives when we’re supposed to, and it’s also super effective against Post Grad Stress.
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