Boom...

I feel it coming, the mid-twenties crisis. I sense it gathering momentum like a bowling ball dropped from thirty thousand feet. I know one morning I’m going to wake up and be unable to look myself in the eyes, and not just because the mirrors in my shitty apartment stop at the middle of my neck.

Here I am: twenty-three, almost one year removed from college, and I have managed to regress back to the job of a kid who just retrieved his GED from the decorative mailbox adorning his parents’ front lawn. Here I am: a magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, mathematics and physics major, making seven dollars an hour, working with people who, odds are, don’t even know how to spell college. Here I am: a failure to myself and everyone around me.

Let me be the first to say it, “I am underachieving everyone’s hopes for me. I need to find a ‘real’ job. I need to grow up.” There, it has been said. Now, never repeat this to me. The last thing someone who knows they are failing life (I wish life’s grade was curved, god knows its bell curve is shifted a tad towards the low end) is to be told that they are failing. Even worse than this is when some tries to delicately skirt the issue and drop little innuendos such as, “Speaking of ____, have you considered…”, these never end well. “Ohhhhh, so you think that I should be doing more with my life? You know what, I never considered that! Thanks for pointing it out. While we’re pointing things out, you may want to step outside of my reach because I’m about to punch you in the face.” And so on and so forth.

Something just struck me and I can’t help but point out the dramatic irony which is simply too good to be kept as such. I am writing these very words while perched on my high-school bed surrounded by my high school belongings and my high school life. That’s right, I’m at my parents house (and by parents I mean mother and step-father, but I am a child of the nineties so that goes without saying). How did I get here? In a car my mom pays for that’s covered by an insurance policy that my mom pays for and with a gas tank freshly topped off using a credit card that, that’s right you guessed it, my mom pays for. How many strikes do you get before you’re out? Well I guess that makes it 749 consecutive innings without a hit, walk, error, fielder’s choice, foul-out, or hit-by-pitch for the home team. You can do the math if you feel like it, but take it from a math major, that’s a hell of a lot of K’s.

…Now that the contestant has chosen door number one, let’s see what’s behind door number two: a high paying job, beautiful girlfriend, and a future brighter than a 10 kiloton nuclear explosion. Too bad all that was behind door number one was the aftermath of said blast.