Sound like overkill for a quiet and mild-mannered 12-year-old with absolutely no record of any other kind of misconduct? Yeah, it did to me, too. If only I’d told them this story, the one about how in 1939 George Dantzig proved two previously unproven statistical theorems because he was tardy to class and mistook them for a homework assignment.

Tardiness, it seems, is a distinctly American concept. That isn’t to say that other cultures don’t have a notion of tardiness, but, due to our country’s history of competition and deeply-rooted belief in upward mobility, punctuality has become very important to us as a society:

It’s no longer just fast food restaurants and “democracy” that the United States is exporting—it’s also our anxiety about time. From how business is conducted to the fight to slow the aging process, our unhealthy attitudes are becoming the common thread that ties our flattening world together. [...]

Americans have always been a work-focused people. And despite the fact that this stresses us out immensely (Americans report feeling more stressed than citizens of other nations, and we also suffer from more heart disease and other stress-related health problems than others), we report feeling happiest when at work. In fact, if we had more free time, surveys suggest that the majority of us would fill it with more work.¹

I’m currently in the midst of a rigorous job search that has slowed down some since I moved to the DC area. Admittedly, I tend to be a fairly lazy person by nature;² working has not been my strongest suit.³ I’ve been loving my little post-grad vacation and I’d be perfectly happy to be a stay at home boyfriend (as my last boss suggested I do). But the honest truth is that I’m overwhelmed by not only guilt but also a certain kind of I guess what you’d call greed. I have bills to pay, yes, but also stuff I want to buy. Nothing important. Just stuff. It’s not only me, though. Here in the “first world” we all feel these guilts and desires, whether we have a sense of self-loathing about it or not. Both the guilt and the greed are, I surmise, distinctly part of a collective American consciousness of which, good or bad, I find I am a part. And to tame the guilt and greed associated with needing money, we’re forced to work and, therefore, forced to be punctual.

But I digress. A useful question to ask, I think, is, now that I’m no longer tardy all the time, had I been a more punctual person as a young student, would I have given my studies more attention? And would that have gotten me into a better university? Would that then have made my current job search that much shorter? Or, more to the point, is it even possible to be balanced enough to feel relaxed, but also be punctual and get a lot of work done?

1. Philip Zimbardo’s delightfully animated talk The Secret Powers of Time explains this concept beautifully as well.
2. Why do you think I was so consistently tardy? I wasn’t getting out of bed on time.
3. Though I’d like to think I just haven’t found the right job yet.

As a recent graduate, and because in just a couple weeks I myself will be ‘commencing’, I thought it might be appropriate to write out a brief sort of retrospective about what bullshit I personally put up with throughout my five years in higher education.

Berklee College of Music

In 2005, during the summer before I began attending college in Boston, on a random visit to walk around campus, while walking down Massachusetts Avenue my then-girlfriend (my first girlfriend) remarked about how lonely and stark it felt. I should here mention that she went on to move to a tiny college town in central Maine and started smoking a lot of pot because of how stark and lonely it was in Maine (I mean… Maine. Let’s get real here).

That said, she was exactly right and I went on to form precisely zero long-lasting friendships at Berklee, likely on account of my commuter status (which commute itself was wholly soul-killing, all friendlessness aside). I later wrote a song inspired by the paradoxically stark loneliness of city life, but due to my less-than-exceptional songwriting ability that little bit was probably lost on most people that aren’t me. Though I still play that song sometimes.

On November 22, about ten weeks into my first year of college, it was raining and for the first and only time in my life I drove myself into Boston with the purpose of withdrawing from Berklee. After leaving the admissions building, I found I’d also received my first and only parking ticket.

North Shore Community College

Any community college that’s in or around your hometown is pretty much guaranteed to feel strikingly as if you’ve repeated the twelfth grade on a different campus and I don’t recommend it if you take yourself seriously—educationally, existentially, or otherwise.

Seattle University

After the whole music thing fell through I knew I had to get a “real degree” and, long story short, I became particularly interested in Seattle and decided it was where I wanted to move. SU offers basically your standard liberal arts education with a Jesuit bent and a highly marketable line about “educating the whole person.” Embarrassingly, part of the whole reason I ended up here instead of UW or UPS is probably their marketing savvy.

But so this ended up being my most stereotypically American collegiate experience, which means pretty much everything you’re probably assuming it does. So, yeah, some sex, some drugs, and lots and lots of booze. Probably about half of my education here in Seattle (as I assume is common amongst most U.S. collegiate students) has been learning just how much abuse one human can endure, meaning both physically and emotionally. What all that’s supposed to amount to going forward I’m not specifically certain. What I am certain of is that—despite the conspicuous absence of responses—the ostensible honor I’m about to receive will allegedly make the job search I’m undertaking that much more likely to result in more remunerative employment.

Also, I feel this is an opportune time to point out that the George Tsutakawa-designed Centennial Fountain on the quadrangle always to me looked feminine and vaguely vaginal, which I guess means the water gushing out of it in all directions perpetually represents a shuddering orgasm. Go Redhawks!

The reason I was in the Apple store in the first place is that, for the second time in two years, my laptop’s hard drive shit the bed. Now that I’m home after a miserable day schlepping over to the University District to get the thing looked at, I’m finding that the absolute worst part about this kind of event (apart from, of course, the risk of catastrophic data loss) is that it serves as a reminder that humans and computers do not work seamlessly with each other. It took only one hour to replace my hard drive once I gave the genius bar my laptop, but when I got it back home and set it up again I was disgusted with the thing. I felt betrayed and like it was a completely different piece of machinery. It doesn’t have any of my files; I instinctively opened iTunes and there was nothing there. It’s like a house I’ve come home to and all my furniture and decorations and appliances have gone missing.

This kind of event also serves as a reminder that humans and computers shouldn’t work seamlessly together. When you start to think about it, it becomes difficult not to worry about the overconnectedness of our lives and the loss of our own humanness we face with the use of ubiquitous social media, status updates about each moment of life (in lieu of actually living), portable phones that you can surf the Internet on, and so on and so forth.

Using the iPad also gave me a sense of the future. This is the direction computing technology is moving such that, in twenty years, I will be confused as to how it works and clumsy with it in ways that people that are being born now will not. Think about watching your parents try to send text messages or use computers; my own interact clunkily and non-intuitively with current technology in ways I don’t because I’ve grown up with it.

But I believe my curmudgeonly naysaying about new technology is due to begin soon. I fiddled with an iPad for ten minutes and I realized that my reaction to it was like that of a spaceship landing: I was fascinated, in awe and disbelief, but I was also afraid. I do not want my life, all of our lives to become any more mechanistic than they’ve already become. I don’t want us to rely any more on technology than we already do. I don’t want man and machine to become integrated like we live in some awful science fiction novel.

Some say the laptop will soon become obsolete and begin to disappear. Though my own hardware seems to chronically and inopportunely fail, I will continue to use my laptop if only to preserve the shrinking gap between myself and my computer.

“You guys are opposites.”

She was born on 2 September. I, on 9 February. Almost exactly four and one half years apart. It doesn’t sound like that big of a gap until you start going back and analyzing it referentially. She was in her sophomore year of college when I was starting high school. When I was watching Rugrats she was likely watching Saved By The Bell or something. We share an affinity for Seinfeld, but she was probably watching it in primetime rather than in syndication. Obviously, things don’t change that much between four and a half years. But they’re different enough that these subtle mental gaps exist.

It was weird at first to think about, this subtle gap, like the final riser of a flight of stairs shorter than the rest by a sixteenth of an inch: not enough to care about generally, but significant and specific enough that your feet, themselves having a memory, will trip on it every time. As I began to understand that we had more in common than I must’ve initially thought, age notwithstanding, that gap began to close. I stopped tripping on that final riser.

But then something else happened, something more interesting to me. My only knowledge of her was pretty much solely through language at this point. I knew how I felt and what I knew experientially—being around her—and from what she told me about herself, and not by much more than that. Which is actually kind of refreshing, not having friends of that person giving their perspective of them, or what have you. But, and this only really happened after she signed up on various social media post-cross-country move (photos necessarily being an oddly obligatory part in participation of same), I slowly began to see images of her as a person younger than I know her. A person once my age, even.

I started to think about stories she told me from when she moved out here, living in an apartment building downtown in the middle of it all, one of my favorite blocks to walk down on sunny days when I first came out here. She was old enough to go to bars on the beloved Belmont, before it got torn down. She told me stories of the people she interviewed for our former employer. And so on and so forth. A life.

What I found, though, in seeing photos and hearing stories, was that I began to unconsciously attempt to occupy a mental space in which I could imagine or in some way synthesize who she was “then” versus (viz. based on) who she is now. It was a strange realization. I was literally writing a life for my own sake and for my own use (think about the Palahniuk line about the one you love and the one who loves you being different people). I was effectively Making It Up. It’s like the blind spot in the back of your eye that your brain fills in based on details surrounding the blind spot. We all do this and we do it constantly—about everything. We are all writers.

The only qualitative difference, insofar as I can tell, between a person and a person that you would call a “writer” is that the person you might call a writer just finds very specific ways of organizing “life data” in language for a purpose. That doesn’t mean the rest of everybody doesn’t write, too. Our very lives are written and, more often than anybody is comfortable admitting, we are not our own authors.

Even as fully grown adults we remain secretly starved for guidance and instruction. Many of us are walking around with the uneasy feeling that we missed the first day of class and wondering if there are CliffNotes. Most people desperately want someone to tell them what life’s about, what people are for, what we’re supposed to do—how to be a human being. But serious literature, at least since the 19th-century, has been disdainful of fulfilling any didactic obligation. Sorry, kids, that isn’t what art is for.

I will not disagree that there exists a certain amount of contemporary art that’s “anti-didactic” (if you will), but my immediate reaction is to dispute any assertion that all modern art avoids entirely this edification, for any age group.

This article is incredibly important, I think, and not only for its considerations about the state and the nature of literature in our lives, but also about our lives themselves. The author says, “I’m over 40 now … and I’m starting to realize, in something like panic, that I don’t understand anything, and that nobody else seems to know any more about it than I do.” Reading this, I could not help but feel that he’s expressing (through a meditation on literature) a fear that’s also been at the forefront of my thoughts lately.

I wasn’t kidding when I said my feelings of fraudulence are a can of worms. They’ve developed pretty steadily through the years; I felt I was a fraud in school because I strongly believed that I’d learned little other than how to bullshit other people. Now I feel as though I’m just bullshitting on my résumé to appear more qualified for jobs.

Last week while at work I expressed this fear to a coworker and he surprised me when he said that those fears don’t go away. “I feel like I should end all of my posts with, ‘You buy that?’” was how he put it. “And the closer I get to people higher up in the field, the more I realize that there are no ‘experts’.” So basically, everyone is some varying level of fraudulent. What matters, seemingly, is how effective of a fraud you are, which I used to think was the secret role of education and the need to accrue knowledge. If I could only be a better fraud, I’d get the best jobs, the hottest girls, et cetera. Cynical though it sounds, what he said actually made me feel better about it all. Yet another friend put it simply:

“It gets better.”

That, I submit, is the true and guileless didactic quality of the art that the above article’s author may consider “anti-didactic”. All the convoluted pomo stuff, all the self-conscious stuff, all the abstract expressionist stuff—those thinkers are trying to show us that we are frauds by exposing the nature of their own fraudulence. It’s an attempt to bring us out of ourselves by trying to bring us further inside ourselves, the sole edifying quality, distilled, being that “It gets better.” It doesn’t get easier, but it gets better. And this is the real secret purpose of education that I’ve been missing all this time. Because here I am retreating further inside my self, and yet I’ve learned to write in ways that try to bring a better you out, trying as best as I know how to relate to you a simple truth that I myself haven’t yet found a way to believe: It gets better.

I know with certainty that she understands the value of words. She understands their power and she understands the kind of meaning they wield and how that meaning can be shaped and twisted and misunderstood. Her understanding of the power of language became very obvious especially when the word “drenched” on a sushi menu would invariably give her pause—something I interpreted so endearingly as the intersection of her understanding of words and her chosen career path of dietary science.

But her understanding of words and language was also something that always troubled me. There was this pervasive sort of fear of language. That she was so deathly averse to any kind of verbal profession of outright affection was indicative of this. So too in her distaste of the phrase “God damn” and the name of Jesus spoken aloud in non-reverential situations (i.e. the taking of the name of the “lord” in vain).

In retrospect, it’s hard to tell whether or not it is her understanding of language that in some way contributes to her fear of intimacy. The difficulty lies, I think, in trying to sort out whether the two inform each other and build to what you might describe as a character trait. And I wonder how much that would inform her other aspects of character: her propensity for blunt up-frontness; her back and forth kind of regard for emotional sentimentality; even perhaps her seemingly strict sense of responsibility to parental figures (which perhaps was also what informed her deep-seated religiosity). What I kind of see developing is this infinitely complex web that you’d I guess call personhood (which, generally, I mean to suggest lies in all of us), the spider at the center of it all weaving the whole convoluted thing being language.

I’m not convinced even still that she wants to be alone, though she says she doesn’t want a relationship at this time in life. While this is a totally legitimate claim for anyone to make at any time in their life, it’s simply not the overall feeling I got from her and from the situation I was in this summer. But then again perhaps I am misreading the whole bewildering web of personhood, the words and letters intertwining and colliding—perhaps completely unreadable in any situation. Maybe in another language even. That seems an easy enough answer. But that, in effect, is I think what so irks me about it. I don’t want the easy answer or the easy solution.

And so I guess what I really do want—my deepest desire—is to be hurt and to be in pain and to have something to complain about all the time. Because if I simply explained away my pain by way of misinterpretation and misunderstanding and misreading the language of personhood, I’d just be empty. There’d be nothing else. And I guess that emptiness is just more fearful than ambling through life feeling like I’ve been gut-punched all the time.

Due to my responsibilities with Grist, I’m able to do bank runs and go to the post office regularly and run all kinds of errands. And what I notice is that I’m coming downtown from somewhere else with the same however-many-thousands of other people, each day. It’s a kind of community. And what my errands afford me is a kind of rapport with them. I see the same people every week at the bank, at the post office, I know the girls in the coffee shop in my building, at the Starbucks around the corner, &c. There’s a familiarity to it, almost a kind of spirituality, really. I have jokes and conversations and a sort of bond with otherwise complete strangers.

I realized that this would be a great photo essay to use as a project for my photography course this quarter: take portraits of and learn the stories of all the people I see downtown every day. The interesting cast of characters hawking Real Change to make a living, the girls at the coffee shop in my building who now know my drink preferences, the guys at the former WaMu (now Chase) Building who think I look like Drake from the show Drake and Josh.

With my commitment at Grist ending in a few months with the end of my status as a full-time student, I can’t think of a better way to leave than to document the faces and personalities that defined my short time in downtown Seattle.

I might not be a typical youth, and maybe my friends aren’t typical, either, but hardly anyone I know aspires to be “that guy” or “that girl,” those once-dynamic individuals who “found someone” and suddenly weren’t so cool. On some level, we envy the scope of their feelings, but we certainly don’t want to become them.

But staying out of relationships can be just as much work as maintaining one. After hooking up with the same person several times I’m sometimes haunted by the “Relationship Status” question on Facebook, and I’ll linger over the button, wondering whether to make the leap from fun to obligation. I envision holding hands, meeting her parents and getting matching ankle tattoos.

Then I come to my senses and close the window.

These words were written by Joel Walkowski—a writer who is younger than me—and appeared in the New York Times quite a while back. On one level, it’s embarrassing that there are younger, more established writers than I. On another, I mostly related to the words he put together. And although I was struck by this article and intended to post it some time ago, it has particular relevance to me now (I saw it again going through my “starred items” on Google Reader).

The article addresses the idea that modern “dating” isn’t actually dating at all, at least not the way it’s classically considered. These days we text, hang out, or hook up (essentially, I guess. Or that’s the premise of Joel’s piece). “In this age of cyberselves, with hookups just a Craigslist ad away, the game has evolved to the point of no rules,” he says. And this is somehow supposed to be better than the alternative.

Some part of me agrees. I have a friend now who recently got into a relationship. He even said when it was fresh something close to these words: “I don’t want to become that guy who gets a girlfriend and disappears off the face of the Earth.” But that’s exactly what he’s become. I don’t remember the last time I saw him without his girlfriend around. They’re so smitten and obsessed with the idea of each other and with the idea of an “us” or a “we” that they spend every free waking moment together. They’ve entirely thrown out each others’ first names in lieu of mere “baby” or “babe”. That’s not even to mention the amount of PDA.

People see this about them and cringe. The girl that I’m currently interested in, a mutual friend to the couple in question, sees them and literally every single time points out that the couple is being “too cute.”

Now take us as a counter-example: I haven’t seen this girl, the one I was working towards possibly being in a relationship with some day, in over a week. She called me a single time to briefly chat, and then neglected to contact me later in the day as she said she would. She asked me not to come to a triathlon in which she was participating. Last weekend, she uninvited me to a trip to Gig Harbor the night before. Rarely, if ever, am I addressed as “baby”. It’s an inconsistent arrangement, not what I’d call overly compassionate, and there’s a noticeable void of emotional intimacy.

Please realize: I don’t say any of this because I want to insinuate that she’s a bad person for all of this. Quite the contrary. What I’m pointing out is that what I’m currently involved in and adjusting to is closer to what Joel describes in the article, a far cry from what our mutual-friend-couple has.

Both arrangements have their pros and cons. In Joel’s, you’re still a “dynamic individual”, cool and untied-down. On the other side, though, you have emotional intimacy, companionship (however long-lasting or temporary it may be, I think it’s still of value). You have a collaborator. A partner in crime.

I re-read Joel’s piece and I analyzed my current situation and I thought to myself, Maybe we got it wrong. Earlier this month, I scribbled in a notebook during a solitary moment: “Perhaps that is the right thing to do: fall so in love that you stop using each others’ names; to be so smitten that you become annoying; to become so obsessed that you become a caricature.” Maybe there’s something to the flagrant PDA, the impersonal “babes”, the sharp fixed focus on a single other person. I thought that maybe, paradoxically, it’s aversion to intimacy that makes a farce of love rather than the other way around. I certainly would not like it if, at the end of my life, people described me as someone who loved fearfully.

Then again—and a more likely hypothesis—maybe it’s just me, and I need to get used to the way different people love others. Which itself should probably be the reason that we hook up and date around at all: to obtain a broader variety of experiences from different individuals.

I don’t think that there is a single person who, cognizant on this day eight years ago, doesn’t have a story. Some of them are harrowing, some mundane, none any less meaningful than the other. I’ve noticed in my travels across the country that, despite the distance from the epicenter and receipt of the news occurring slightly later, the stories of those who lived thousands of miles from New York City bear a similar feel and weight to those of people considerably closer.

I have a story. And my story is just as pedestrian as everyone else’s, a little embarrassing even. It was only later—much later—that I would understand fully what kind of effect The Event had on me. I was 14 years old. It was the first week of school at Peabody Veterans Memorial High School in Peabody, Massachusetts. Already the stage was set for my entire world to change, so perhaps what was about to happen didn’t seem that fantastical to me. Or maybe I was still a small child who had no idea what was happening.

I was sitting at my desk in the center of Mr. Mongirdas’s freshman history class. Everyone in the class had filed in just a moment before. There were many students that I knew from elementary and middle school and some that were still strangers. Mr. Mongirdas was late coming to class by about ten minutes. We all sat, talking to one another and waiting. When he finally did arrive, Mr. Mongirdas said something to the effect of, “A plane has his hit the World Trade Center in New York.” He was a young guy, in retrospect probably not much older than I am now. He had short, curly brown hair and a distinct, sort of nerdy voice. He told us that we’d go to another room that had a television so we could keep up on what was happening.

The entire class stood up and left their things at their desks and noisily filed to another classroom around the corner. I don’t think that any of us had an idea about what was really happening. I certainly didn’t; I remembered hearing about a single-engine plane hitting the Empire State Building some years before. I thought this would be a similar situation.

The entire class filed into the room around the corner with the television. This was before each room in the school had a television in it. I stood towards the door without a decent view of the TV. I remember not seeing much, but also not being incredibly concerned. I was mainly focused on a girl that was in the room who, in retrospect, was not very attractive and whom I later heard many unflattering stories about, of a sexual nature.

And but so the whole class sat there watching the towers burn, watching The Event unfold as I stood in the back of the class and checked out this not-so-attractive girl’s ass. As the bell sounded we filed to fifth period. I remember sitting in class as Ms. Farrell, one of my favorite teachers even to this day, allowed us to speak freely and openly about our thoughts on the experience. One student—I even remember her name: Leida Peña—heard a jet outside (in retrospect, it was probably a fighter jet, as all commercial airline travel was suspended). She expressed out loud a fear that the high school was going to be attacked. I scoffed at this thought; I thought it outright silly that any kind of terrorist (or whomever) would want to attack a high school in middle class suburban Massachusetts.

I look back at this experience and I am filled with a sense of embarrassment and shame. Especially when you consider the people who escaped—or worse, died—from the experience.

But as I stated: only much later did I understand what this experience meant to me.

Entering high school during the September 11th attacks means, essentially, that I, as well as many thousands of others, came of age during the George W. Bush administration. We grew up with warrantless wiretapping, the Iraq War, the PATRIOT Act, etc. My only memories of the administration prior are of the Lewinski scandal proceedings (which, admittedly, I knew very little about 11 years ago) and the fact that my D.A.R.E. graduation certificate was “signed” by one William Jefferson Clinton, whom at that age I did not understand to be the same Bill Clinton that was our then-Commander-In-Chief.

My point is that I believe my generation—those born between the years of 1984 and 1989—are The Most Cynical Generation in History. Despite the Nixon and Reagan Eras, despite the ‘60s and their numerous assassinations of popular progressive political figures, I think that the children born in the mid- to late-eighties, now in their twenties, belong to The Most Cynical Generation of Americans ever bred.

You can see it in our tired, rolling eyes. You can see it in our spines when we bend over backwards (and, let’s be honest, forwards as well) to allow our elected officials to take frequent advantage of us, the constituency. I would describe it as a collective slouch, a detachment and apathy so pervasive that we’ve all simply given up on what is “good” and “right”.  David Foster Wallace describes it thus: “The likeliest reason why so many of us care so little about politics is that modern politicians make us sad, hurt us in ways that are hard even to name, much less to talk about. It’s way easier to roll your eyes and not give a shit.” Everyone born between 1980 and 1990 cares so little about politics that it’s visible in our faces. And I think this is for a reason.

Coming of age with George W. Bush in office, with the September 11th attacks (i.e. The Event), with so many attacks on personal freedom and the egregiously fallacious doctrine that peace is achieved with force; I believe that these things have affected us in such a way that politics has become a collective gaping yawn. The quote Powers-That-Be have gotten us to a point where we care so little that they are able to do pretty much whatever they want.

At some point I was planning on writing an essay in which the thesis was that this is the importance of Barack Obama himself (which, by the way, the so-called Baby Boomers entirely fail to understand): that he was able to inspire The Most Cynical Generation in History to care again about life and politics (not because of his race or political affiliation, etc.). Obviously, I never got around to that. But I think that today of all days is no better a time than to express the sentiment that what this country requires more than anything right now is exactly what we don’t have: cohesive discussion, cooperative efforts for what is “good” and “right”, spirited debate that doesn’t involve pejoratives, threats, and weaponry. How sad that the single day that the entire country came together beyond political and racial boundaries was when nearly 3,000 of our own were heinously murdered.

Is this what some sort of cohesive discussion requires? Death on a massive scale? If we cannot come to some sort of agreement about health care (for contemporaneous example), then is it perhaps correct to say that more of us deserve to die to solidify some sort of decision? My question, in a broad sense I suppose, coming from The Most Cynical Generation in History, is this: what must be done to solidify some kind of agreement about what is “good” and “right”? Certainly my hope is that continual, perpetual death is not the answer to that question, as it seems it has been to the generations prior to mine. My hope is that The Most Cynical Generation in History finds a way to decide and adhere to what is “good” and “right” and ends the kind of cycles by which the first decade of the twenty-first century has very upsettingly been wholly defined.

Photo above made by Reto Fetz in 1986.