Graduating, is, like, weird.

          There is something dull, and repetitive, about bringing up the fact that getting older is hard, and that it feels really freaking strange. And yet….I am getting older, I am finding this fact quite hard to deal with, and lately, I feel sort of strange. Really strange, actually.

           When I was little my best friend Mardy and I used to play pretend a lot. (And I don’t mean when we were, like, four and playing Ariel humps Eric on the Great Barrier Reef; we used to play “grown-ups” and “apartment” when we were, like, eleven. Or fourteen.)

             “Grown-ups” consisted of us pretending we were in college, and living in a really cool city that was my bedroom. We wore lots of red lipstick and drank Crystal Light out of shot glasses (lemonade that we had mixed ourselves, might I add) because we loved the scene in “The Cutting Edge” when Kate gets wicked drunk with Doug in the hotel bar, even though we had no idea what getting drunk was back then. (Apparently licking salt off your wrist and shaking your hair around like a maniac to loud music is fun, even if you’re not actually drinking tequila.) Point is, we thought that being old would be totally awesome, and that we’d be really good at; that whenever we were “older” we would feel really fabulous.

             I don’t feel fabulous right now. Not unfabulous either, though. Just sort of meh. I feel sort of eh. It’s an, “excited but scared!” feeling, otherwise known as insane.) But really, it’s like, this is it? I’m a college graduate…and I still feel this young, this silly, this non-adult like? I certainly would not have been playing this game as a child if I knew this to be the case. Cry me a river, I know.

    I spent this past weekend with my high school friends, celebrating their college graduations. You know how it goes: bringing up embarrassing stories about each other that are really old and stupid, binge eating, binge drinking, more binge eating in an attempt to cure the hangover the next day. I found myself contemplating death as we played charades and continued drinking the night after one party, though watching someone like my friend Victoria try to mime “colonoscopy” for the crowd is always a good cure for a headache.

(Btw, great article on hangovers in the new New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/26/080526fa_fact_acocella?currentPage=all.

 I especially liked this part of the Joan Acocella article, when the author quotes Kingsely Amis description of “the metaphysical hangover”:

” “When that ineffable compound of depression, sadness (these two are not the same), anxiety, self-hatred, sense of failure and fear for the future begins to steal over you, start telling yourself that what you have is a hangover. . . . You have not suffered a minor brain lesion, you are not all that bad at your job, your family and friends are not leagued in a conspiracy of barely maintained silence about what a shit you are, you have not come at last to see life as it really is.” Some people are unable to convince themselves of this. Amis described the opening of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” with the hero discovering that he has been changed into a bug, as the best literary representation of a hangover.”)

I had an idea towards the end of my days as a college student that maybe part of this whole “graduating” deal was that in the future-as a shiny, proper, adult-I would never again get that particular kind of drunk that finds a person waking up in the morning and helplessly grabbing for a sharp object to stab oneself with because their brain, liver and sense of morality feel so atrocious that death itself seems like the only logical option if one is going to continue on. (This assumption was mostly based off of the pride felt after I managed to have only a few drinks the night before my graduation, therefore allowing me the luxury of enjoying the day sans migraine/horrific flashback episodes. Maturity, indeed.)
             Well, I’ve been hung-over approximately 83% of the time since I graduated. In my defense, I was not the one, after a night of celebrating my friend Laaaen’s new role as a degree holder, puking into a Shaw’s bag in the passenger seat of a car at 11a.m. in the morning. No, that would be my friend-and fellow graduate from a respectable academic institution- Charlene, who frequently drinks to the point where she can be found, by the bar, slurring her words and moaning/giggling/playing with her hair/making cougar noises at all unsuspecting males within a fifteen feet radius.
             I believe we were both cut off by the bartender that night. Surprisingly, we’re also both unemployed.