Actuality

thatfunnygirllauren asked: Comment--Your blog makes me happy that I'm not the only one going crazy in post-grad. Concern-I don't hear from you enough! Harassment--BLOG BLOG BLOG. I miss your funny posts!!!

haha, well thanks! I plan to have another post up this week. I’d like to blog more frequently but unfortunately real life gets in the way sometimes lol. 

 Okay fellow Post-Grads, lately I’ve kind of been annoyed. No, more than annoyed, pissed. No, just freakin’ out of my mind frustrated. As a new graduate, it seems like my patience for things that tick me off is wearing thinner with each passing day. Life events that would’ve barely gotten under my skin last summer are making me want to pull my hair out this summer. I don’t know if it’s the fact that I’m just older and more bitter, or that I have no more familiar pattern to follow as I did in summers past. What I do know is that I sometimes resist the urge to come home, turn on the faucets in the bathroom, and scream till my throat is raw (which, as a former singer, scares me to even type). Many of you may have read my last post, where I discussed a huge life decision that I have weighing on me. Never fear, I will get back to that topic in another post at some point, but today I can’t. Today I’m just too stinking mad. About what, you may ask? Well, I felt it would be cathartic to type out a list in hopes that maybe some of you guys could relate. So, without further ado, here ya go:

1. My awful Country Club job. Yeah, I know, the economy sucks and I should be happy I even have a job. But sometimes I nevertheless wanna drown myself in one of the toilets or showers in the bathrooms I’m in charge of cleaning. This job has taught me nothing aside from the fact that rich people are messy, their children are brats, and my parents did a hell of a job raising me to be a normal person compared to some of the members at that place.

2. Speaking of my parents, let’s get one thing straight: I love them. Really, I do. But I can’t live with either of them for more than three months at a time without going insane. They both have their own life problems, and I feel a lot of the time like I can’t fully focus on my own life when I’m home because I end up getting dragged into family drama.

3. I don’t have a bedroom. Anyone out there who can come home at night and close a door behind them to shut out their sucky day, I envy you. Pull out sofas are only fun on vacation or when you’re at a sleepover. Living in the middle of the living room definitely gets to you when you’re woken up at 5 am every day by your parents leaving for work in the morning and you haven’t slept in past 7 all summer.

4. I have no friends to hang out with. The four years I’ve been away at school have pretty much killed the friendships I had from high school. It’s expected that everyone moves on with their lives. But sometimes after a long shitty day at work, it would just be nice to have someone to get ice coffee and chat with.

I’m going to leave it here for now. I do want everyone to know that I don’t intend this post to mean that I think I have the worst life ever or that I’m a negative nancy. I realize that in many respects I’m luckier than most other people out there. I only mean to share my view on things in the hope that another Post-Grad out there who’s having the same feelings as me might feel a little better knowing that someone else out there has the same issues. So tell me, do you ever have days where everything just bugs the crap out of you? We’ve all been there, but in the end it’s important to remember that most people have at least some good in their lives at any given moment. No matter how sucky things seem at the time, you have to remember the little things when the Post-Grad going gets rough.

I found out yesterday that I was denied my scholarship to go to Grad school. It sucks, I basically spent all day in bed a miserable wreck and eating food worth four times my daily caloric allowance. But unfortunately life goes on and I now have some tough choices to make. If take out the loans and get a job, I’ll have 72K in loans from undergrad and grad school total. But, if I stay home and work, I know I’ll be miserable. I’ve never liked living at home and I have no friends here. If I stay I would avoid loans, but I wouldn’t have a life. It’s a tough decision. 

As I sobbed with my totally awesome best friend via Skype last night, she asked me something that I had a hard time answering: Is a lower student loan payment really worth my unhappiness? My answer up front is No, it’s not. But my parents don’t seem to agree. They think it would be wiser for me to stay home. To be honest though, part of the reason I don’t want to stay here is because my relationship is better with my parents when I don’t live here. Don’t get me wrong, they’re both awesome, but they both have their own problems that end up getting in the way of my life a lot of the time.

But on the other hand, I feel enormous guilt at the thought of taking out more loans. I feel like it means I wasn’t good enough, like I wasn’t supposed to be there in the first place. Was I really meant to go to school there if they wouldn’t even give me a scholarship? I just don’t know.

This is gonna be a short blog today, fellow Post-Grads. I need some opinions. If you were in my situation, what would you do?

Anonymous asked: There is no next step, and thats the beauty of it. You have the whole world ahead of you and you get to make the next step that society hasn't planned for us. I too am an unemployed recent college grad, crying when i walk into target and school supplies are on sale. Im applying to jobs everyday. Ive applied to about 200 now and here i am reading this blog, living with my mom, sister, and 4 year old niece. Cheers!

Thanks so much for reading. It’s nice to know that there are other recent Grads who understand. If you have any friends who are recent Grads themselves, pass the blog on. I’d like to share my thoughts with as many people as possible!

The hardest part of being a Post-Grad is waiting. Almost everyone I know that graduated is waiting for something. I personally am still waiting to hear if the scholarship that’ll enable me to go to my dream Grad school in the Fall is gonna come in. Waiting is really one of the hardest things in life. It can be torturous at times. There are days when I want to rip my hair out because I just want to know what I’m doing, what my next step needs to be. I have never done well with uncertainty, and this last month has nearly killed me, especially since Grad school is pretty much the only way I can get myself to my final goal: doing research about language acquisition and education. 

Still, it’s good to know sometimes that I’m not the only one stuck in limbo. Several of my friends are still trying to find jobs. Others want to get out of their parents’ houses. The grand prize though, goes to my best friend. She’s going away for a year to a Grad school program where she’ll be far away from everything and everyone she knows. She has to endure a full 52 weeks in this program, because the training it’ll provide is the only way she can rack up enough experience to get a job in her field. 

I’ve lived most of my life with the expectancy that all my wants will come to fruition in terms of my education. I applied to college, got in, graduated, and now… well, now, I have to sit around and hope that the plan I’ve laid out for myself is going to work out. 

I know where I want to go with my life, but I feel like I can’t set anything in motion until I hear about this scholarship. Have you ever had one of those dreams where you’re trying to run away from something scary but your feet are glued to the floor? Well, that’s how I’ve felt this past month, like my feet are glued to the floor and I can’t do anything until I get them unstuck.

The frustration can be overwhelming at times. I mean, it’s freakin’ July already and I’m getting more and more nervous as time goes by. I’ve taken to writing post cards to people I know who are in different cities than me over the Summer (which, to be clear, is everyone I know) just to take my mind off of the situation a little and keep me from wishfully checking out apartment listings for the place that I may never have.

If it wasn’t for the reassurance of my awesome, yet slightly crazy family and friends, I’m pretty sure I’d have totally lost it from the anticipation by now. My Mother always says people make plans and God laughs. That scares me a little. If God, in whatever form you do or don’t believe him to exist, laughs at this, then where does that leave me? Let’s just hope he’s not in a joking mood for the next few weeks.

Up until the age of 22, the lives of people of our generation follow a pretty structured plan. Junior year of High school you pick out colleges, and you wait patiently the following Spring for responses. Once you pick one, it’s time to celebrate graduating high school. Then it’s off to adjust to life as a sort-of adult for the next four years of fun! And by that I mean partying and studying. But then, somewhere around October of Senior year a horrible feeling of dread sets in: There is no next phase of the plan. No next step that you’re expected to take along with the masses. You have to start piloting your own life, and what’s worse is you have to do it all by yourself.

The funny this is, our society is sort of responsible for letting this feeling of total panic bitch slap us across the face. We spend out entire upbringing watching shows like Friends where people with college degrees sit around in trendy apartments and sip coffee while talking about their off-beat, cool jobs. But I digress. When I personally first realized that purposely failing all of my Spring semester classes wasn’t an option, I started to have what can only be described as a small nervous breakdown. I had so much I wanted to do, but I wasn’t sure what the right path would be. As a foreign language major, would it be more beneficial for me to teach abroad for a year or go to grad school? Would I want to move home? What about all my friends? There were suddenly all these questions and seemingly no right answers. Life at my large Mid-Atlantic University was slowly slipping away, and life as an adult was fast approaching.

This was also around the time that people around me started asking the question that scares and frustrates the crap out of almost all recent or soon-to-be grads: “So…what are you plans after graduation?” Now, don’t get me wrong, the first few times are innocent enough. But by the time your 3rd cousin once removed is posing once again at Easter dinner, the only thing you want to do is scream “I HAVE NO IDEA. CAN’T EVERYONE JUST LEAVE ME ALONE!?!?!?”

And this, fellow Post-grads, is why I’m here: to chronicle the ups and downs of a recent grad who’s throwing herself into the uncharted waters of the real world for the first time. 

So, if you’re up the same creek as me feel free to read along. I can’t promise you’ll always be on the edge of your seat, but I can promise no sugarcoating and no fluff. Just straight to the point stories and opinions about the life of a college grad, in actuality.