POST GRAD STRESS appeared! Kelly used TRAVEL! It was super effective!

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. 

We also collect ALL the free things when we go on our Facebook outings

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.

My Monday

After work today I decided to undergo a solitary adventure.

I went to go audition for a choir I found online by googling “recent college graduate desperate for other college graduate friends and also a non-karaoke musical outlet”. 

That’s not actually what I looked up, it’s just what I was thinking while I was looking things up.

Anyway, after my audition I had an hour to kill before choir rehearsal, so I wandered aimlessly and ended up walking into a mostly-deserted bar. 

When I came in, the manager behind the counter looked confused and asked hesitantly if I wanted food.  I said no. “Are you with that group over there?” he offered, indicating four Asians sitting in a corner.  He was really trying hard to find a logical explanation to my being there alone.  I offered none.  “No, I am by myself,” I said defiantly.  “And I want a drink.”

"Ah… really?  Um.. so I guess you want a shot or something?"  Good grief.  I hadn’t anticipated this kind of reaction.  It’s like he assumed I was seriously depressed and must want to drown my sorrows at being alone in vodka.  It was also like he was scared of catching "loner" by talking to me too freely.  (But the other dudes at the bar were by themselves too, weren’t they??  What gives? I guess loner guys are more acceptable than loner girls at bars. SMH!)

So I took upon myself the challenge of proving that one can be a socially adept female and still go to bars by oneself (without straight up saying something like, “Don’t worry, my solitary appearance is neither contagious nor malignant). We had a good, normal conversation and the manager started to relax, and he and I ended up coaching another guy there who wasn’t so socially adept on how to be more so, and we all became good friends. I departed with a merry wave, promising to come back soon for karaoke night.

After that I realized I probably shouldn’t go to my first practice smelling like Jack and Coke, so I stopped at a food mart to buy mints. I debated with the cashier on whether “wintercool” or “peppermint” was a more legitimate choice, and we eventually settled on wintercool because the packaging matched my teal scarf.  It was fun banter, but then we got into a heated argument over whether or not student government is a tool of university administration, so I left yelling over my shoulder “NO IT’S NOT”.

Once I got to Cal’s campus, I decided to check out the little signs people posted on the notice board.  This particular one grabbed my attention:

As was the case at UCLA whenever I saw one of these, I immediately got really excited.  Shit, $15 an hour to do a study??  And then I realized that I’m a working adult now and I already get paid $15 an hour (to go on tumblr… hheehe)

I feel like it’s going to take a long time for me to stop feeling like a student.

Anyway, after that really random tangent (sorry), I finally made it to rehearsal!

The ladies handing out music at the door saw I was by myself and kept referring me to a “loner’s packet” and I was getting a little annoyed, because is it really that big of a deal to come alone to the first choir practice, and then I realized they were saying “loaner’s packet.”

Then I walked into the rehearsal room and there were about a hundred and twenty people and almost everyone was seventy-something years old and retired. 

(half the reason I came was for the hot asian guy in this picture on their website, but I couldn’t find him there)

At that point, however, I was just going with the flow.  I made lots of senior citizen friends (it may have helped that I was still mildly inebriated), butchered some French and Italian lyrics, and gulped down the rest of my cool, winter mints.

Anyway, the lesson I learned today is that you can be by yourself, graduated, activityless, and friendless and still have an interesting Monday.  It’s just about aggressively pursuing an interesting Monday, ya know?  Don’t let people make you feel bad for being alone- ask those haters if they’ve tried it, because sometimes, it’s really quite fun.

Dear Internet

Dear Internet,

I’m mad at you. 

Don’t get me wrong, we’ve had a great relationship these past (let’s see, I got email in 5th grade?) …twelve years.  You’ve done a lot for me.  I’m grateful to you.

But the part of you that’s classified as “social networking” has disappointed me as of late. 

You used to be so thoughtful.  You would let me write lengthy emails back and forth with people I cared about and we would pose questions, gossip, discuss our love lives, and reminisce together. 

And then you gave us Xanga, and we all got one, and even though we weren’t extremely eloquent writers at the age of 13:

Hihi peeps.  What is up with the away messages??? God like half the people on my buddy list are away.  If you’re away for more than like, an hour, DONT DO AN AWAY MESSAGE, SIGN OUT.  Ok…..got that outta my system…..lol. OKAYY so I am supposed to do HW rite now but I am procrastinating, big suprise there.  Haha Jason is coming back this weekend already!! Guess he misses home and Japanese food! Can’t live w/out it.  Maybe I’ll go to collage at UCI and live at home so my mom can cook Japanese food 4 me!  hahaha….not.   Wowo this is the longest entry I’ve had yet! coolio. ALRIGHTY hope you all are doing good, cause I am! NUMBER 3 IN GEOMETRY WHOOHOO!!!!OO… I figured out my new cell phone #…its 749-2339. I think. So call me on dat one, k?

it was still a place where we talked about our thoughts and our lives in detail.  It was a space where we were the creators and got to craft grammatically-horrendous sentences about us and our apparently extremely passionate disdain for the inappropriate use of away messages, and we tried to be thoughtful.  If we included pictures they were intended to supplement our words.

And at the same time, you gave us AOL Instant Messaging (AIM). 

This opened up a bunch of possibilities. 

When we got home from school, we could continue our conversations and our schemes to force a group of boys into becoming our guy friends and asking us to Winter Formal (long story). 

We could flirt with our crush and open chat rooms with the entire sixth grade class and collectively wonder if the teacher really didn’t notice that we were shooting staples at her during that whole volcano lesson. 

AIM was awesome, and we had many quality conversations on it.

And then, you offered us MySpace and shortly after, Facebook. 

We added our best friends and had moments of confusion/anxiety when you expected us to rank them from best to last resort. 

We didn’t really get the point of Facebook “statuses” (Kelly Osajima is: wondering what to write here) , so we mostly ignored them and instead wrote on our friends’ “walls” and carried out “wall-to-wall” conversations.

We browsed for an hour or so, then we shut you off and went back to whatever it is high school students do (failing AP Chem in my case…although my teacher pitied me and my balancing-equations-disability so much that she ended up letting me scrape by with a C-).

I like to think that we had a healthy relationship, Internet- we had some quality engagement, but knew when to put space between us. 

But now, I don’t really know what’s happened to you. 

You replaced Xanga with Tumblr, and instead of writing about their thoughts and their lives in detail, people “reblog” attractive pictures and stuff that other people said, and it’s not a journal at all as much as a confusing jumble of funny memes created by others and inspirational quotes said by others. 

It’s annoying, because I go to my friends’ blogs hoping to hear about them, not about random strangers.

I DO AND NO ONE CARES

And that’s kind of what you did to Facebook as well. 

It’s no longer really a place to communicate with specific people as much as a void where we throw out twenty thousand separate insignificant things like instagram pictures of our food, and what movies we’re about to watch, and how we don’t like the current weather, to no one in particular just all 2500 of our “friends” who are all doing the same thing and consequently it’s stupid and incredibly overwhelming. 

And I get why people like it- you play up our narcissism.  We enjoy posting these statuses because when 50 people “like” it, it translates to “50 people think you’re awesome!” in our heads that so often need reassuring that we are as loved as we hope we are. 

And we devote much more time than we should to looking at all fifty million of these stupid posts because you made it addicting, and does any of it really impact us or help us grow?

I dont care about your hamburger. And I apologize if I offended the random person I took this from.

And of course, when you came around to introducing Twitter I lost what little respect I had left for you.  How are we supposed to type something meaningful in 140 characters?

I’m sorry for getting emotional.  

The point is, Internet, I’m upset at what you’ve turned us into.  Passive spectators when we used to be thoughtful creators.  Sometimes I feel like a zombie, mindlessly scrolling through newsfeed and not really benefiting from any of it.  And when we do create, it’s an Instagrammed photo, it’s 140 characters.  How many people write blog posts nowadays as long as this one? Not a lot because it just isn’t normal anymore.  And we’re not used to putting in the time anymore.

In retrospect, I guess it isn’t really, entirely your fault.  Sure, you provided the forum, but I guess we’re the ones that used it the way we do now.  So I guess what I really want to say is this:

Dear People on the Internet (including myself),

We’re constantly plugged into our social network sites, we’re constantly updating each other, but it’s an overload of unnecessary information.  We need to decrease the massive quantities of what we choose to put up and increase the quality of what we’re saying.   And we need to remember what we used to use social networking for- as a meaningful supplement to our relationships - and maybe try to get back to that a little.

And when you get a cool looking burger at dinner with your friends, maybe instead of giving in to your first instinct of “Wow, I gotta get a picture of this then instagram it, then put it on Facebook so everyone else can “like” it!”, maybe you could just enjoy the food, leave your smartphone in your pocket, and focus your full attention on the people sitting there with you.  And if something crazy happens at dinner, laugh about it and turn it into a great story to tell people later on.  Or, you could always blog about it. (;

Love, Kelly