Sink or swim time, baby

The need to write this post has been looming over me like a creepy old granny who wants you to visit her and pour her some of delicious soy milk. Does that make sense? Do old grannies loom? Do they all sit around drinking soy milk while yelling at the A’s game on T.V., or is that just mine?

Anyway, now that I finally have the time to write it, I've decided to keep it short. A disclaimer: I graduated from college yesterday, so you should probably expect a lot of weird and nonsensical things to appear on this website, as I think the completion of twenty years of non-stop school has sped up the process of my becoming an insane person. Or, a looming old granny—again, am I making ANY sense?

The first point I want to make is that after you’ve been a student for almost as far back as you can remember, it’s a difficult and surreal thing to wake up and suddenly not be one. Every website/online journal I’ve ever had has been backed with writings about being in school, and I’ve used my full-time student status as an excuse to keep a messy room, a lame retail job, a terrible diet, a sad excuse for a bank account, etc. And now what? Now that I’ve walked across a stage in an obscenely purple gown and been in the presence of Gavin Newsom (yet again) and received a diploma cover containing a letter that basically says: Hope we don’t find any holes in your transcript and can really send you a certificate of completion in two months! I’m supposed to suddenly be things like mature? responsible? So I can do what? Get a career? make decent money? get a house and a husband and some kids? Can I really do all of those things? The second point is that I’m not so sure I signed up for this.

This morning while I was driving to the job that I’m supposed to leave because I’m supposed to be actively searching for my career, I kept feeling this strange feeling all over my skin, like I’ve crossed an invisible threshold into some place where the air is magical and if I don’t be very, very careful, it’ll whip at me and make me chapped and dry and wrinkled until eventually I look just like AN OLD GRANNY.

Why everything keeps coming back to grannies right now is beyond me.

In my about page I say that this site chronicles a springboard. Well, school was like the equivalent of me slowly, SLOWLY walking toward the edge of that springboard, and graduation was the equivalent of jumping off into some deep, dark, immeasurable space. I imagine that it’s like the feeling kids get when their nutty uncle picks them up and tosses them into the deep end of the pool just to see what’ll happen, and let me just say right now that I’ve never been a very good swimmer. I don’t plan on letting that get in the way though; after all, Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team, Steven Spielberg dropped out of school in junior high, and Beethoven’s music teacher called him a hopeless composer. You can thank Mr. Newsom for those little tidbits of information, which he included in his address to the class of 2008 in addition to the hope that we all fail at least a few more times in life, and that we do it with great enthusiasm.

That my friends, I think I can do.

Ready, set, GO!