April 20

Oh April 20. How fondly dost thou linger in my memory; a splendidly sunny spring Saturday in the middle of the Mitten you were, watching over the 4 of us graduating from lovely Alma College. More like 384, because with 4, we wouldn't have to sit around and hear names called for 62 hours. Aguilar, I believe, to Zimmerman, was the order. But I could be wrong.

I'm not in any sort of graduation mindset because the couple people I know who're graduating from the University of Tampa still have about 3 weeks. But the Scots graduate Saturday, meaning it'll be the 4 year-anniversary of the Class of 2002 walking and quite possibly the last time I was ever to encounter Dr. Hulme. Technically, the anniversary is today.

I'm not sad, or sappy, or silly; I just think it's a good time to reflect on life. Four years of college, and then four years of non-college. What have I done?

I think living in the nation's capital was a nice first step after that horrid I've-graduated-and-I'm-sending-out 1,000-resumes phase. (Speaking of which: I don't think that's such a big problem if you go to school in a city where there's an actual economy. You can do internships while you go to class and still want to stick around after school's over, unlike, say, Alma, where there are no internships and no one wants to stick around. I mean, I got my first job because of a Washington, DC, summer internship, so I can only assume that physically being in the city for 4 years would have yielded a variety of opportunities.) Working at a solid institution like Georgetown and meeting/seeing some serious movers in society (Bono, Clinton, Donaldson, William Peter Blatty, look I'm name-dropping) was good for my big-picture philosophy...seeing these people as, well, people, made them smaller. Bono is insanely short.

I wish Chris and I had lived together. We still have a damn fine friendship, but we would have had so much fun. We did anyway, playing tennis and going to PollyEsther's and rooting futilely for the Hoyas and eating dinner with Sarah every Friday night.

I gradually began to learn the DC game; the Hollywood of the East, and I didn't want to play it anymore. I couldn't care less who you knew, and that made a difference to a lot of people. What was worse was that, since everyone was fairly intelligent, they made a point to not let you know that they knew people, and that was somehow more infuriating than them actually telling you. Right.

Almost as infuriating was the non-conformist conformity. Again, everyone was so bright that they had no problem marching to their own drummers, knowing that everyone else was as well. But becuase everyone was marching, the non-conformity became conformity, and blog posts started sounding lame and slightly postmodern and English-professory, so they stopped when necessary.

Raleigh sucked. I recommend no one move there. It's too American; too suburban, too Garage Sale Saturday, so blah that it trumpets its blahness ("a great place to raise a family!"). Had it not been for the Mudcats, I pretty much would have hated my life; as it was, I didn't have time to hate my life. You learn lots of fun lessons about the world and people when you go from an ultra-sophisticated environment at the 24th-best university in the country to a minor-league baseball team in the sticks of North Carolina where dropping F-Bombs in meetings is commonplace, accepted, and even encouraged.

It was there that I began to learn that everyone's out to benefit one person. That made me sad, and still does, as it's magnified 100 times in Tampa Bay. I'm having a difficult time dealing with how self-absorbed people are alongside loving my day-to-day job. As for the region, I can't really imagine living in a more beautiful place in the country besides San Diego, various spots in upstate New York, and a smattering of hamlets on the Great Lakes. Don't get me wrong: Tampa and St. Petersburg, as cities, are ridiculously ugly and fairly lame (Tampa having no downtown to speak of), but you can turn in almost any direction at any time and see water. You can get sunsets without California. You can go jetskiing in February.

In sum: I'm ridiculously happy with my choices over the last four years. I've managed to live in 3 major (or semi-major) American cities, visit most of the others (Seattle?) make friends in almost every state east of the Mississippi, keep friends from college, find my career direction, get engaged, all while embodying the principles of a certain fraternal document. Oh yes: And have fun. These last four years haven't been Alma-style, but what ever could be?