Career . 03/06/2008 01:29 AM . Christopher Newgent

Maybe this is only for liberal arts majors; maybe this is for everyone. The post-collegiate lull – a time very similar to the act of looking for anything worth anything to listen to on your car stereo. You press seek over and over, land on station after station, some fuzzy, some clear, until eventually you realize that at this point in the drive, there is nothing good on the stereo. So you settle on an oldies station, those golden classics that you grew comfortable with riding around with your grandparents as a kid. You settle on that for now, but you know that when Pasty Cline and Buddy Holly get a bit tedious, you’ll filter through the static again to hopefully find a decent hard-rock station.

The question will come, always. What do you plan to do? As soon as you hit the age of 16, that question never stops. Even after you’ve graduated college and have settled on a nice little country station of a job, it will come in the form of, “So you’re a career man now, eh?” Which, when translated means, “You really think you’ll want to do this the rest of your life?”

This question, in its many forms, is often directed from your grandparents. Your grandma asks you again when you’ll graduate college. (Translation: “You graduate soon, don’t you? Now what do you plan on doing?”) You say again how you graduated last December, how you’ve gotten a job at a software company. They treat you well there, yes. Free soda from the cooler, even. An ice machine that makes going to work somehow more worthwhile; you’re not sure why it’s the best ice you’ve ever had, or when you got to a point in your life that you’d be excited over ice, but that’s beside the point. The point is, is that you are excited about ice.

You smile and don’t mention the dab of potato at the corner of your grandma’s mouth. You answer her questions gladly. She shakily manages another piece of roast beef into her mouth. “Why are old people always eating roast beef?” you think. When she looks up, you can tell someone’s hit the reset button again. All you can do is brace yourself for the chance to answer again what you don’t have answers for.

Mainly because the answer is that at this point in your life, you can’t imagine doing any one thing for the rest of your life. You can’t say that to your grandparents, though. Your grandfather, after all, worked the same job for the same company for thirty-seven years before finally retiring. He was content there, bringing home his money to feed his family. It was all very Leave It to Beaver from what you’ve heard in the stories from your father—picnics and baseball games and Buicks and Boy Scouts. It’s hard for them to even grasp the fact that the average length of time a member of Generation (wh)Y stays at a job is only two to four years.

It’s as though we and our older siblings in Gen X grew up watching our grandparents and even some of our parents with their silly fear of change, their silly regard to stability, and we decided instead to fashion an atmosphere of ultimate instability—where there are bottom-lines to trim, avian flu pandemics that never break out. And seriously, the question begs to be asked, how can gas jump a quarter per gallon in the span of a day? You watched the news. There were no bombs dropped, no Bush-administrative hard-ass’ery* towards some oil-laden country—even the DOW stayed pretty constant that day. But, now you’re riding your bike to work to save the environment along with some quarters, your resume is constantly posted on Monster.com (“Just in case,” you say), and you’ve forgotten about the birds.

But, I mean, honestly, who wants a gold watch anymore, when all we really want is to find a song that doesn’t suck for a change?

I’ll tell you, though, there are songs out there that will wake you up, that are raw and honest instead of over-produced and over-played. They’re likely not on the radio; turn it off. Roll down your windows and breathe. Try to remember that first gasp you took when the doctor smacked you, your lungs suddenly able to work without drowning, and all you knew to do to celebrate the bright lights of the world was to cry out. Try harder. You won’t remember it, but try harder anyway. Don’t worry about your hair tousling in the wind. You can fix it later. Trust me, you can fix it later.

Christopher Newgent lives as a writer in Indianapolis. His work has appeared in Copper Nickel, Poetry East, and other journals.


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