After the Sweet Buzz of the Weekend, the Nasty Hangover of Reality...
I ended up making a Charlotte trip on Friday, and it resulted in a fantastic weekend. Caught up with some old friends, saw one of them get married off, watched some football, and took full advantage of the uptown nightlife. The trouble with such a great weekend, though, is that it can make your normal day-to-day life seem less than stellar by comparison. I'll go ahead and warn you, this entire post might be somewhat depressing, so I might end up taking it down if I look back after a day or so and it reads too much like a suicide note. Anyway during the 4-hour drive home Sunday afternoon, I seemed to have a million somewhat-related things running through my head, like:
- I'm not sure how much longer I can pretend to be happy about living in Wilmington. Don't get me wrong, Wilmington is a nice place. In fact, if I had to pick any city of less than 100,000 people to live in, this one would be high on the list. It's young, it's growing, it's near the beach...there's not a lot to dislike. The problem is that I want to live in a big city. That's what I wanted after I finished college (placing me in Miami), after I finished law school (sending me searching for a city other than Miami), and that's what I still want now. It just didn't happen to end up that way. And as hard as I've been trying to repress that feeling, being in Charlotte for a few days really stirred it up in me again. Did you know that Charlotte is actually bigger than Seattle, Boston, Las Vegas, Atlanta, and Miami? OK, that was random. But I just feel like I'm missing out on my chance for the big city experience. What if I'm 30 and I finally get promoted/change jobs/whatever and get moved to a city...just at the time everyone else is deciding it's time to move to the suburbs? Shit, you're only young once, and I just feel like I'm wasting it. Maybe I would hate it. Maybe I'd come running back to small town living as quickly as I could. But if never even try it, I could never really forgive myself.
- While I have lots of friends with "good jobs," I'm decidely more envious of my non-law friends' jobs than the ones my law friends have. Honestly, they're doing some pretty cool stuff. I've never been too shy (except to people at work...don't really want that one floating around the office) about expressing my general indifference to the practice of law, and getting together with my college friends reminds me why. I hear things like "when I get off at 5:00..." and "what are 'minimum billable hours?'" And not there's the whole money thing. Not that we ever specifically discuss salaries, but they all seem to be doing about as well financially as my law friends. Just being in their apartments, noticing what restaurants they suggest, etc, can give off plenty of clues. I'm seeing that 3 years of experience/promotions can put you in basically the same spot as 3 years of extra school when you also take into account the 3 years worth of student loans that you get to subtract from your salary each month. Sure, I know there's an element of "the grass is always greener" at work, but it's something I've been thinking about.
- I still have a fairly respectable alcohol tolerance. From around 10 PM Friday until about 10 am Sunday, I was sober for a grand total of probably 4.5 hours. Got into town - pregame, then to the bars. Saturday morning - beer and football. Saturday afternoon - open bar wedding reception....and then back to the bars. And overall, I didn't come out of it feeling nearly as bad as I thought I might. But on the other hand....
- Vault Energy Drink affects me in the same way as I imagine cocaine would. I rarely drink caffeine at all. Pretty much never. But about 3 hours into the drive up, it was getting late, and I decided to stop and get some food at Burger King. Vault was a part of the soft drink lineup, and I thought to myself, "hmmm, that should keep me wide awake for the rest of the trip!" Holy Shit! By the time I got in Charlotte I was shaking like a Parkinson's patient and talking like the Micro Machine Man. It took several beers just to bring me down to normal.
- Why do girls ___? What do they mean when they say ___? What about when they do ___? What was she thinking when she ___? What....? Fill in the blanks however you want. Those are questions that have no answers as far as I'm concerned. I'm just very confused. I just, uh...err....I've said too much already.
- Want to know how to start feeling depressed real fast? When you say, "This has been the most fun weekend I've had in months!" and the response is "Well this is how it is pretty most of the time here...except when there's not a wedding or something we just watch more football."
- Wedding season is now officially over for me, and crap do I have a LOT of married friends now. And I'm as happy as I can be for all of them. I really am. But I'm starting to feel like people are now getting certain expectations for the last of us single folk. "So, when are YOU gonna take the plunge?" They may not be saying it (except my mom - she actually says it) but they're thinking it. What about when these married folks start having kids? What if I'm still single when they have kids? What would my mom say about that?
These thoughts weigh heavy on my mind.
- I'm not sure how much longer I can pretend to be happy about living in Wilmington. Don't get me wrong, Wilmington is a nice place. In fact, if I had to pick any city of less than 100,000 people to live in, this one would be high on the list. It's young, it's growing, it's near the beach...there's not a lot to dislike. The problem is that I want to live in a big city. That's what I wanted after I finished college (placing me in Miami), after I finished law school (sending me searching for a city other than Miami), and that's what I still want now. It just didn't happen to end up that way. And as hard as I've been trying to repress that feeling, being in Charlotte for a few days really stirred it up in me again. Did you know that Charlotte is actually bigger than Seattle, Boston, Las Vegas, Atlanta, and Miami? OK, that was random. But I just feel like I'm missing out on my chance for the big city experience. What if I'm 30 and I finally get promoted/change jobs/whatever and get moved to a city...just at the time everyone else is deciding it's time to move to the suburbs? Shit, you're only young once, and I just feel like I'm wasting it. Maybe I would hate it. Maybe I'd come running back to small town living as quickly as I could. But if never even try it, I could never really forgive myself.
- While I have lots of friends with "good jobs," I'm decidely more envious of my non-law friends' jobs than the ones my law friends have. Honestly, they're doing some pretty cool stuff. I've never been too shy (except to people at work...don't really want that one floating around the office) about expressing my general indifference to the practice of law, and getting together with my college friends reminds me why. I hear things like "when I get off at 5:00..." and "what are 'minimum billable hours?'" And not there's the whole money thing. Not that we ever specifically discuss salaries, but they all seem to be doing about as well financially as my law friends. Just being in their apartments, noticing what restaurants they suggest, etc, can give off plenty of clues. I'm seeing that 3 years of experience/promotions can put you in basically the same spot as 3 years of extra school when you also take into account the 3 years worth of student loans that you get to subtract from your salary each month. Sure, I know there's an element of "the grass is always greener" at work, but it's something I've been thinking about.
- I still have a fairly respectable alcohol tolerance. From around 10 PM Friday until about 10 am Sunday, I was sober for a grand total of probably 4.5 hours. Got into town - pregame, then to the bars. Saturday morning - beer and football. Saturday afternoon - open bar wedding reception....and then back to the bars. And overall, I didn't come out of it feeling nearly as bad as I thought I might. But on the other hand....
- Vault Energy Drink affects me in the same way as I imagine cocaine would. I rarely drink caffeine at all. Pretty much never. But about 3 hours into the drive up, it was getting late, and I decided to stop and get some food at Burger King. Vault was a part of the soft drink lineup, and I thought to myself, "hmmm, that should keep me wide awake for the rest of the trip!" Holy Shit! By the time I got in Charlotte I was shaking like a Parkinson's patient and talking like the Micro Machine Man. It took several beers just to bring me down to normal.
- Why do girls ___? What do they mean when they say ___? What about when they do ___? What was she thinking when she ___? What....? Fill in the blanks however you want. Those are questions that have no answers as far as I'm concerned. I'm just very confused. I just, uh...err....I've said too much already.
- Want to know how to start feeling depressed real fast? When you say, "This has been the most fun weekend I've had in months!" and the response is "Well this is how it is pretty most of the time here...except when there's not a wedding or something we just watch more football."
- Wedding season is now officially over for me, and crap do I have a LOT of married friends now. And I'm as happy as I can be for all of them. I really am. But I'm starting to feel like people are now getting certain expectations for the last of us single folk. "So, when are YOU gonna take the plunge?" They may not be saying it (except my mom - she actually says it) but they're thinking it. What about when these married folks start having kids? What if I'm still single when they have kids? What would my mom say about that?
These thoughts weigh heavy on my mind.
posted by jonphiwil @ 9:04 PM
3 Comments:
At 11:45 PM ,
The Brewer Patriot said...
good post, dude. i feel the exact same way about being a lawyer. to me, it isn't any different than washing cars or scooping ice cream or something. it is just a means to pay the bills until i find the job i really want. maybe i wasted my time at law school, but i wouldn't trade it casue of the people i met. but was the $100,000 in loans worth it? doubtful, at best.
since i don't really like miami, i too feel like i am wasting my time by not being somewhere i really like. soon i will be 30 with less opportunity to just pack up and move somewhere.
so basically, you wrote the exact same post i would write with a few minor changes.
At 4:50 PM ,
SuperBee said...
We all feel this way. Don't sweat it. Grey's Anatomy had a very interesting quote, though. (Don't pretend you don't watch it.) While explaining why Meredith was such a flaky bitch to Finn, Callie let him in on the secret that we've been in school for the last seven years, so basically, we're still stuck where we were developmentally, when we finished high school, because we've been in the incubator of higher education since then.
Thirty is the new twenty. And it's true. Are you ready to get married? Hell no. Do I want to settle down and have kids? Eventually. But not now. That's a "long way off" when I'm an adult. At 26, I still don't consider myself one. I don't want to have a baby, and I don't want to lose the prospect of banging lots of different people.
We all want to live in a big city, for all it offers, but whereever you live, it's going to get boring. Miami is boring as hell. (So is Wilmington, but I could have told you that.) The grass is always greener on the other side. You moved from MIA to Wilmington b/c Miami had a lot of annoying crap you didn't like. New York has it, D.C. has it, Boston has it, Chicago has it. The only thing that's going to make a city interesting is if you have a lot of friends there to make it interesting. How much fun is the coolest bar, if you go there by yourself? And how AWESOME is the worst bar, if you're there with a lot of people you like?
All of us have to take a breath and realize that well-spent or not we went to law school. It doesn't mean we have to be lawyers, but if we're not making the kind of money in another job, there are going to be sacrifices that we have to make, in order to pay that monthly loan check. Maybe those sacrifices will be worth changing careers. Maybe not. We do have a nice indoor job, with no heavy lifting, as Graham used to say. I thought about that today, as I watched the Window Washer dangle 10 flights above the ground on a wooden swing.
Point is... I think it's the curse of our generation to have these quarter-life crises. We were all raised for greatness and complete fulfillment and now that we're working, it's like "Wait. What? This is what it's going to be like for the rest of our lives?" Our friends who didn't go to law school got over this two years ago and don't even remember it anymore...
We'll be okay in another year... we'll balance our lives and have a better grip on what's going on. We can't, however, hold ourselves to the example set by our college friends... because we're three years behind them.
At 10:41 PM ,
jonphiwil said...
Wow, it seems like a) what I wrote actually made sense, and b) others can identify with it. At the time, I honestly thought neither of those was true.
BP - law, at least so far, is just a paycheck for me. Maybe everyone goes through this when they apply to any law/med/mba program, but I just had these assumptions that law would become a true passion or a calling by graduation time. Not true at all. I just don't care. And at the same time I feel weird that I don't care because it took such a huge investmenr of time and money to reach this point. On the other hand, would I trade the friends and experiences of law school for anything? Not at all.
SB - I love the point you hit on about comparing ourselves to friends that didn't go the post-grad route. Law school actually is a pretty sheltered environment as it turns out. It just seems strange to me that people my age have been out and working for 3 or 4 years. I've always thought of people my age as being at the same point in life as me, but that's simply not true right now. In maturity and emotional terms, it's really no contest. Maybe that's why I feel so not-awkward about trying to hit on the undergrads in my building. Or maybe that's just because I'm a sketchy, sketchy guy. Either way, I'm OK with it.
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