“Don’t cry…it’s only a teenage wasteland.”
That was my senior yearbook quote. It was truer than I knew – I meant it as a sort of “don’t worry, this will all be over soon enough” but in retrospect, it’s more like “look, this is real life, the whole world is like high school – so you may as well learn not to cry over it.”
My original concept for this post was six-plus months in the making and pushing 8,000 words. After reviewing it, I decided it was the most pathetic self-serving sorry-for-myself whine-tasting imaginable, so I figured I would hit the high points and try to squeeze something good out of it. So here goes.
Looking back, the two formative traumas of my life were easy to pick out: the mistake of undergrad and the premature loss of my father. Given that I spend most of my life wanting to go to college, it’s not surprising that I would feel the void for years when it didn’t work out – and after bombing out of grad school and losing my father almost a year later, it’s not surprising that I sort of went bye-bye for about a year and change. So – time to start unpacking this. What did I want out of my college experience? The Real Genius scenario. A girlfriend (which didn’t exactly work out. Twice). A sporting affiliation – tailgating, rush the court, wear the colors, paint the face. Hanging out on the dorm quad. Prank hacking a la MIT. The gang, the clique, the crew, whatever.
The person I am today was, for all intents and purposes, born in greater Washington DC. With no college friends, my family disrupted, an undergrad experience I didn’t want to claim and a grad school stint I didn’t feel I could, I basically started life fresh and rebuilt myself there. And I put together a team and a gang and an experience there that almost made up for college – I sort of made the EUS into my college pals, with the Redskins as our varsity team and the 4Ps as our dorm quad. Guys graduated (Casman, the Lyon King, etc) and new talent came on (Fred, the Scotsman, the Daves). I had different “roommates”, different girlfriends, and eventually “graduated” myself and left town (right down to all of the graduation imagery in my iTunes playlists at the time and my parting email to my co-workers). So can I somehow persuade myself that was enough? That the seven years in DC can backfill for those seven lost college years?
My problem, ultimately, is that I don’t have the memories I wish I had from the college years. Or maybe it’s that I did get everything I dreamed of, but in an extremely delayed and deconstructed form – and if you’re wrapping up your college experiences ten years later than normal, it stands to reason that you’d be in denial about how old you really are. At some level, I think I must still believe I’m in grad school – that I can drink ALL THE DRANKS, stay up late, stand and scream nonstop through three-hour ballgames, go bounding up the stairs two at a time – and because I spent so much time living alone and keeping vampires’ hours, waited so long to get married, have no kids, work in a college environment, have Cal football tickets, blog about Vandy basketball, swap tweets with players half my age…at some level, I almost convince myself I’m still in that space. But I’m really not. I’m a little wobbly after two quick drinks, I need to be in bed before midnight, I stay seated for everything but third down on defense, and most weekends I just want to be away from folks and in my own home.
I think part of the delusion is fed by that big black hole in my 20s – having failed to use up my full allotment of insouciant youth, I think I should somehow still be entitled to it. Like it or not, though, that youth shit has an expiration date. A while back, I told my wife that I’d rather be 60 and trying to act 40 than to be 40 and trying to act 20. There’s just something about switching from a 3 to a 4 in front that changes things, that makes things more foolish, that makes some things seem more immature than ever. A 30-something can still brandish a Nerf gun behind the desk to ward off his co-workers. A 40-something just seems ridiculous. At 40, the songs of your childhood creep into oldies range and you start worrying about the health of your parents and their friends. 40 is where the end of teenager-dom – which I clearly remember being full of regret and nostalgia for me – is officially half my life ago.
Forty is the age that forces you to stop pretending.
Let’s be honest – on paper, I should be great at being 40. I’ve spent my whole life being too mature and responsible for my age. I’ve been smoking a pipe off and on for twenty years already and drinking whiskey on the rocks for at least fifteen. I would stand in the pub as a single young late-twenty-something and have sweet young things telling me how much I reminded them of their grandfather. But I have to accept that yes, I did let some of the best years of my life run out from under me, and they’re gone for good – and more importantly, I have to figure out how not to resent it or dwell on it.
I’ve spent years and years mulling over how to solve that puzzle – that there must be some solution which would make it all make sense, make it all worthwhile. Because that’s what I’ve done my whole life. Pick the correct answer. Solve the word problem. Troubleshoot the glitch. There’s some piece to figure out that makes everything work again, scores the point, provides the solution – and if I find the magic formula, it not only makes everything worthwhile, it fixes everything – and the void’s not there anymore.
The only problem is with trying to find the solution is that this time there isn’t one. At some point, you have to find a way to acknowledge that shit happens, that life is full of randomness and it doesn’t always work out or even mean anything, that we live in a world of chaos and entropy – and you have to find your own light. And for someone whose worldview has always depended on consistent rules and logical solutions, the real world is ever more difficult to cope with.
And thus we get to where I am now. I have an amazing wife, and a good solid job, and a nice house and a pretty good car. I have 12Mbps broadband at home, and HD television, and a lightweight laptop at work and a miracle of a cell phone in my pocket. I have a little bit of a reputation as a Vandy blogger, and real-life friends and acquaintances that serves me for a social life of sorts. I have a routine, and a place to lay my head, and I try not to think too far down the road. The goal is to live in the now, in the moment – free of both the tyranny of memory and the trap of expectations.
That’s not a problem with a solution either. You just do it, and hope nobody looks too closely at how.
Or to put it another way, there’s another line from the same Who song that should be the yearbook quote as I graduate from my thirties. If I can live by that, I ought to be just fine.
“Don’t need to fight to prove I’m right/I don’t need to be forgiven…”