Post-College Bitter Bitching

It's been said that college spoils you. You graduate high school and you think, oh man, this is it. The real world. I'll be on my own.

Well, to that, I say, yeah fucking right.

You're not on your own in college. You're in a dorm, with a professional staff there to help you will all of your problems. Then, if you move from the dorms into on-campus upperclassman housing like I did, you're living in a four bedroom, two bathroom townhouse. Have a problem with your toilet? Call maintenence and they'll fix it for free. Your stove broke? Here comes the maintenence crew with a new one, again, free of charge.

And if you're lucky enough to be like me and most of my friends, your parents (and their money) are just a phone call away. Basically, you get all of the perks of being someone's dependent without having to answer the typical "when are you going to be home" questions.

Moral of the story: In college, you couldn't be more pampered if you were still in diapers.

While the transition from college to the working (read: real) world has been relatively easy for me, I miss a lot about college. And it's not a constant longing, it comes in waves.

Like when I paid fucking $10 to do my laundry at some sketchy Chinese laundromat this afternoon. My college offered free laundry. I could separate my whites, my darks, my bright colors, and all of my underwear and waste a ton of the Earth's resources, free of charge. Now, at $4 per load, you can bet that color and fabric don't make a difference anymore. Jesus Christ, $10 for two loads of laundry? Am I living in West Germany before the Berlin Wall fell?

But that's one downside in a sea of good ones. For example, I'm still blown away by how lively my neighborhood is on the weekends. You see, I grew up in the middle of nowhere. I had one neighbor who built his house himself out of old trees (he was a tree surgeon). He had a rooster that woke me up every morning and he would ride his llamas down the road. I'M SERIOUS.

The new neighborhood, though, is a bit more lively. Every Saturday, there's a flea market two blocks up from my apartment, and at the journalism school right next to my apartment, the Brooklyn SPCA always has a menagerie of dogs and kittens to be adopted. I try to stear clear of the SPCA because I know that if I stop and look I will definitely end up with a kitten. An orange one. I will name him Sherbert. STOP. NO CATS ALLOWED IN MY APARTMENT.

Anyway, since there were no seats inside the laundromat, I ended up sitting outside a fancy schmancy bakery on a bench. I went inside to get a lemonade because it was sweltering out. All of a sudden, two pre-adolescent boys show up with guitars. They started playing and singing. One looked like Jack Black with a cute little Jew fro. Precious. And then he started singing:

"Please give us your money
Hello miss, can you give us some money
I know I'm singing really out of tune
Just give us some money
And we'll go away"

It continued on like this and I was amazed at how industrious these kids were. Every time I come out of the grocery store, there's an old guy with an eye patch shaking a cup with change in it. At least be funny. If you can come up with a way to be clever, I'll likely want to give you money. But if you're just sitting there, looking one-eyed and pathetic, I don't really care. Call me a monster. You're a cyclops. Too far?

I was going to give the kids a dollar anyway, but then the kid sang:

"You just paid $4 for a lemonade
I know you can give me some money"

He got me there. $4 for a fucking lemonade? Who am I, JD Rockefeller?

Whatever.

Today, I'm happy to say that the next generation of homeless people will be a lot more creative and less crazy.

Hearts to Brooklyn.

For realsies.