A Champion of Mediocrity

Sometimes, late at night, I worry that I will never get a job. Not really in a "oh god, am I going to live on the street?!" kind of way, but a passing "hey, you know- emily. it's been a few weeks. maybe you should really be concerned about this." But then I make myself a pb and j sandwich and it's all better. PB and J is a pleasant reminder of my youthful, carefree days. As I am now 22 and graduated, what else do I have to look forward to? Retirement? Hence the pb and j therapy. You might say it hearkens back to my youth and more secure guidelines; I say it's delicious.

In the tradition of our victimless society, though, I feel I must be able to blame someone for these shortcomings. Let's start with... public education. Now, I have nothing AGAINST public education. Where else would I have learned about sex? Or had my fill of chicken tenders? But- and I'm being serious here, people- public education is where my downfall began.

In high school you could do a million extra-curriculars (assuming you're mildly intelligent and actually sit down every so often to write some things down as "homework"). Yearbook staff, soccer, the literary magazine, theater, and chorus? Of course you can! (Hypothetically.) All at once? Naturally. So what if you don't have a specific interest! People are just happy that you are interested in something. No one tells you that you can't do all these things, because they're just happy that you're not on the roof outside your window smoking pot (hypothetically assuming you have a roof outside your window) or pregnant. (Or both at the same time.) So after four years of endless club meetings, community service fairs, and that thing called "homework", you graduate. This is all well and good, and you go off skipping your merry way to COLLEGE. College is big and scary (or, in my case, small and scary) where there are people smarter than you. However- and here's the kicker- there's still no one there that says "Hey, you know Emily, maybe you should think about honing in on one or two activities. Y'know, really focus in." Or, if they did, you probably weren't listening because you were 18 and knew it all. So you can do anything you want, and you do! But this time there are a ton of free tee shirts and sometimes a lot of credit for when you do those things well. And life feels pretty good getting that "liberal arts" education that everyone seems to think is so sparkly and wonderful nowadays.

I have news: it is not. Because then you graduate and realize that there are people, people your age, who have real skills and have been doing real things like working for years. Years! After sixteen years of education and god-knows how much money (that usually and happily is not yours) your liberal arts education has made you a champion of mediocrity. Your skills are that you can play four instruments poorly (or six instruments very poorly), write a kind-of persuasive paper, sort-of do research, and you sort-of know a bit about computer programming, ecology, and history. You can kind of speak a few languages, but not enough to travel anywhere and get a dual-language job, and you're not that bad, really, at public speaking. But. You don't have any specialized skills, no, not really. Doing a lot of things kind of well certainly makes you interesting, but that's not exactly a strategy for securing a long-term job. You're not even quite sure about what field you should be in, let alone a job in that field. What has all this time been for?

Maybe in a different economy the thousands (ten thousands? hundred thousands?) of us who are liberal artists would be able to be hired in any field we choose. But now, in what is strategically one of the most terrible times to graduate in the history of ever, employers want people with marketable skills. You mean (you seem to ask yourself) that there are colleges that don't just give you to cursory knowledge of many different realms of learning? They actually teach you to "do" things? So you scoff you lofty liberal and arty scoff and then move back to your parents home, for what you thought would be a temporary move. Then, after a bit of time in"funemployment" (a happier way of thinking of yourself as unemployed) you realize that, "Hey, maybe people WON'T want you to come to meetings and only be able to offer quick retorts and snappy pop culture references." If you don't come to this conclusion, you should. Your overview of international politics, 18th century european novels, and the biology of the tropics can probably all be learned on wikipedia nowadays, anyway. Sixteen solid years of education and you're kind of at square one. But now you know a lot more useless facts. Maybe you could go on Jeopardy. (But alex trebeck does seem like kind of a dbag.)

Where did this all come from? Well, today I got "let go" from a job that, technically, I hadn't even started yet. Can I really call it being let go, then? So what if I didn't really "know" how to make chocolate- I would have made an excellent chocolatier, and don't you tell me differently.

The phone call still hurt my ego (isn't there a job for me... anywhere?). But then I got a peanut butter sandwich and sat down to the history channel to discover early Mayan culture. Because if I'm not doing anything, I might as well learn something. Or maybe that's how this whole mess started, sixteen long years ago...