Thursday 4-30-09

Completion (graduation)

A common mistake people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
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Douglas Adams (1952-?) British musician and author.

Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five.
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W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) British novelist and playwright.

Man finds nothing so intolerable as to be in a state of complete rest, without passions, without occupation, without diversion, without effort. Then he feels his nullity, loneliness, inadequacy, dependence, helplessness, emptiness.
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Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) French mathematician, physicist and philosopher.

To accuse others for one's own misfortunes is a sign of want of education. To accuse oneself shows that one's education has begun. To accuse neither oneself nor others shows that one's education is complete.
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Epictetus (50-120) Greek philosopher.

Syrtash, Andrea. How to survive the real world: life after college graduation. Atlanta: Hundreds of Heads Books, 2006.

Honestly, this wasn't incredibly informative. Maybe it'd be helpful for the stereotypical movie college sorority girl or frat boy who never lived with anyone that wasn't going to college and always had their parents to pay for whatever they wanted, but for me this was a bunch of sappy dribble. People condensing their life advice to a short paragraph will always sound that way. Most of the advice was about stretching your parent's dime as far as possible before you have to be on your own. But that's not really fair, especially if your parents just threw tens of thousands of dollars at you to go to college. "I went to Aruba and soaked up all the carefree moments I could" Well that's just great advice to anyone who can go to Aruba, but I would say most of the country doesn't have that privilege. I think my living experiences during college have prepared me for life in the real world, because between my freshman and senior year almost none of my friends were college kids. They all had full time jobs and had been paying their own way since 18 or earlier. I've lived with all types of people from those that started smoking crack and stole all the rent money to the plain old assholes who throw temper tantrums above your room as revenge against your polite request to not talk loudly outside your bedroom door at two in the morning. I've also lived with people who wanted nothing more than to just sit in their rooms after a ten hour work day. I know what I'm going to do when I graduate - I'm going to get a job because that is the only thing I can do. I will live on the good graces of my friends as long as I can until I can support myself in my own apartment. I will hope that I have time to go camping or to the beach, but I don't count on these things happening over anything but a weekend. I'm certain that I cannot afford to backpack around Europe because as cheap as that might be the plane ticket is damned expensive. I will do my best to promote my photography and my skills as an artist and hope that within the next decade I will be working more in the arts than in retail. I'd like to go back to school someday, but until I know for what I'm not worried about it. I may want to go for photojournalism, I may want to go for illustration, I may want to go for graphic design. I may even want to go for psychology or mass communications. Until they combine these things into the perfect manifestation of Megan's personality major, I will probably just work on them in my spare time (hopefully getting discount art supplies from my job at Plaza - fingers crossed!) As long as being an adult means I don't have to give up speaking my mind, I think I'll be ok.