gsdgsd wrote:
A full FIVE YEARS. Jesus, I'm OLD.
I've been dealing with the same feeling lately. My tenth high school anniversary is coming up next year, and I'm just barely going to get my Bachelor's in 2003. (Only one course left -- yay! -- , and it's over in mid-November because the Prof is going to Antartica. To look for meteorites.)
To drive the point of my slackerhood home, the universe has conspired these past few weeks to rub my nose in various circumstances:
* A friend since fifth grade just got his Ph.D in Physics, and he has been spirited away this very week to a college in the Pacific Northwest at a $48,000/year professorial gig. In the time it takes me to finish a degree, better people wind up as
faculty.
* Animal House has celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary, and I keep seeing the clip of Belushi on the lawn with a dazed look, saying "Oh, man -- seven years of college down the drain." And I think to myself,
nine. Nine years between UCLA and the U of A. I have two years on Brother "Bluto" Blutarski. And much less partying to show for it.
* It still seemed like my Junior High School years were relatively recent, something not necessarily of the current decade, but not that temporally remote from my present self, either. That illusion was shattered recently, for The Olsen Twins, omnipresent media incarnate, have been tarted up as Britney-Spears-esque Rolling Stone covermodels.
-- When my eye passed over the cover, in the tiny instant between wonder-who-the-hot-chicks-are-this-week and sweet-lord-now-I-feel-like-a-pervert, the thought that spang into mind was: they were
fetuses opposite Bob Saget on Full House when I was in Jr. High School.
My own mortality is beginning to weigh on my mind in different, less abstract ways than before.
But when I feel discouraged, I can now say "hey, at least I'm not luring 15-year-olds back to my house and jacking off on their faces."