It is Memorial Day, the last day of May, and many of the students in my neighborhood are moving out, leaving refuse piles of various size and shape (and refuse) in front of their respective domiciles and on the front porch. Some of these people look older, like it may be their last May and they are graduating, moving on to better things, which may loosely translate into a desk job in an office, within a cubicle, somewhere. (I do not know what kind of employment scenarios the university is preparing students for these days).
I nod to some of these people as I walk to the store today, bidding a final adieu to a girl I vaguely recognize as the driver of an automobile I also used to own. Maybe I look familiar to her- as the guy who used to shamble by her front porch after a night out somewhere, or a fellow student in a graduate class at the university. But the grim truth is, I am many years removed from the student experience, having graduated long enough ago to have held many traumatizing desk jobs and time cards punched.
It’s kind of a weird feeling to have, but within the mixed vibe of something ending and the possibility of a new beginning, I cannot help but seize on the sadness implicit in this experience- of these people lurching forward into the ‘adult world’ of student loan repayments and cubicles and brokenness. An article yesterday in the New York Times relates that the average college student graduated with nearly 40k of student debt in ’07-‘08, which may hinge on yet another banking crisis. Which bodes poorly as a projection of future employability, and will reduce, by percentages, many people’s hard work and years toiled to being, uh- not as valuable as they may have once been.
From another perspective, there is the whole jargon about a liberal arts education and the independent thought process. Although, I guess it's sad to admit that these students probably could have just gleaned this same information from the liner notes of the last Animal Collective album and put the considerable savings towards a trade school degree which might actually get them employment, in the end. But it’s a tough bag, and nobody said it wasn’t.
When I return from the store, there are still several houses in various phases of the absconding process. On the corner of Hamilton, I walk past a house with an unusually tall porch, and I imagine climbing up there with a bullhorn to deliver a final commencement address to the remaining students, George W. Bush-style. I don’t actually know what I would say to them, but it would probably be something about the good weather and the infinitesimally smaller shadows within the overarching and spanning shadows of doom. Or if not that, something similarly uplifting. Which seems like a fair message to dispense.
