Post-Grad Boogie

Sometimes, I like to pretend I’m a character on Suits. A kick-ass forensic accountant wearing a suave outfit and shooting fast and witty comebacks to all the lawyers around me. Naturally, in this fantasy Donna is my best friend, I get paid a lot to do very little and a miracle occurs where I manage to wear high-heels all day without dying.

Donna’s first words when she meets me.

A quick look around my surroundings is all it takes to violently spring me from this fantasy and back into reality. Every surface in my room is covered with textbooks, readings, cue-cards, post it notes and hand made calendars with wild scribblings of all the dates my assignments are due.
Post-grad life isn’t nearly as glamorous as my Suits fantasy. To be honest, the only occupation post-grad life is more glamorous than is being a dole bludger; but they earn more money so even that’s disputable.

So with my mind firmly in reality and assignments looming, I’d like to procrastinate list (yes, I don’t actually have time to write a full column, so a list will have to suffice) the fun things I have learned and experienced about post-grad studies.

I like to call it the post-grad boogie. It’s kind of like the greenback boogie only with less money and fame and higher rates of unemployment and daytime drinking.

1. Despite what you learned as an undergrad, Thursday night is a weeknight. You’re expected to be productive Thursday night and wake up before 9am Friday morning.
Crazy, right?

2. You’re expected to refrain from drinking Sunday through to Friday afternoon – including day-drinking. Seriously.

3. Post-Grad is triple the work of undergrad and only half the fun.

4. I’m lying; it’s none of the fun.

5. Your monthly calendar looks less like the responsibilities of one person and more like the responsibilities of a small country.

6. You become obsessed with efficiency. To the point that you break down and publicly abuse people if their way of doing things takes even a minute longer than your way would.

7. Your main life survival skill is multi-tasking.

8. You have no idea where anything is on your campus except for the 2 buildings you have classes in.

9. During the start of semester you drink coffee. Obscenely large cups of dark coffee.
You shout “Thank God for caffeine!” at complete strangers whilst nervously attempting to conceal your involuntary facial twitches.
Towards the middle of semester you realise that drinking coffee is an inefficient process as it requires time to order, make and drink. Thus you develop a mildly concerning addiction to caffeine tablets.

10. Social events on campus? Say, what now?

11. You seriously worry your relationship with the library is becoming too intimate so you swap libraries. You then worry about how your initial library feels about you cheating on it.

12. Lists begin to turn you on. Everything that can be written should be done so in an efficient list format. You then put your lists up on every wall to ensure all you ever see, think and dream is lists.

13. You have vivid hallucinations of attaching the 10 weighty textbooks assigned to you per semester to your torso and then jumping out a high window.

14. You have absolutely no school spirit. You’re pretty sure your university colours are a light colour and a dark colour but can’t remember which ones.

15. Your to-do list is organised by chapters.

16. If you’re not in a serious relationship, you’ve started to feel really really self conscious about the extremely high percentage of classmates that are in a serious relationship.

17. You’ve gotten to know your professors a little too well, including a lot of unnecessary details about their personal lives. You’ve become a little concerned by this fact.

18. You live in hope of keeping your memories of university longer than your student debt.

19. You’re pretty sure that ‘graduate student’ is an oxymoron but you’re too tired to care.

20. You’re excessively worried about your thesis and exams, but you shouldn’t be. Given the rate you’re going at, you’ll be dead long before then.

Taylor Swift’s 22: A critical analysis

I currently have a obscene economics assignment where I have to ‘critically evaluate’ various papers that discuss the economic impact the current situation in Syria will have on both the Middle East at the World.

It’s thrilling stuff.

However, actually researching the assignment seems like a productive use of my time so instead, I’m going to critically evaluate ‘22‘. A song by Taylor Swift that I feel is rife with inaccuracies that simply must be rectified.

So from someone who is 22 and actually has the ability to hold a boyfriend for more than a week before writing a song about him; here are the more accurate lyrics:

It feels like a perfect night to dress up like hipsters watch girls in our pyjamas
And make fun of our exes, Tony Abbott
Uh uh uh uh
It feels like a perfect night for breakfast at midnight assignment writing
To fall in love with strangers To cancel on our friends, eat ice-cream and google Ryan Gosling
Uh uh uh uh
Yeaaaah

We’re happy free confused and lonely overworked, poor, exhausted and confused at the same time
It’s miserable and magical miserable
Oh yeah
Tonight’s the night when we forget about the deadlines, our looming Hecs debts
It’s time to call our parents
uh uh

I don’t know about you real adults
But im feeling 22
Everything will be alright if you keep me next to you give me an assignment extension and a loan
You don’t know about me
But I bet you still want to keep reading my mildly incoherent blog
Everything will be alright if we just
Keep dancing complaining like we’re 22, 22

It seems like one of those nights a uni night
This place is too crowded expensive
Too many cool kids hipster students
It seems like one of those nights
We ditch the whole scene and end up dreaming instead of passing out from far too much wine

Yeaaaah
We’re happy free confused and lonely poor, unemployed, exhausted and confused in the best worst way
It’s miserable and magical sad
Oh yeah
Tonight’s the night when we forget about the heartbreaks, the ever growing graduate unemployment rate
It’s time to accept we’re going to live with our parents until we 30
Uh uh

I don’t know about you and your tendencies to want to be a real adult
But I’m feeling 22
Everything will be alright if you keep me next to you I stop comparing myself to you
You don’t know about me
but I bet you want to You saw me at the pub worrying about the state of our country
Everything will be alright
If we just keep dancing complaining like we’re 22, 22

I don’t know about you how I’m ever going to finish my economics paper, 22, 22

It feels like one of those nights
We ditch the whole scene our theory that we’re actually sane
It feels like one of those nights
We‘ll won’t be sleeping with our insecurities
It feels like one of those nights
You look like bad news someone I wouldn’t find attractive without a lot of wine
I gotta have you, I gotta have you

I literally don’t know about you have any revenue
But I’m feeling 22
Everything will be alright if you keep me next to you world leaders start being better people
You don’t know about me
but I bet you want to You hear me constantly rant about socialism, feminism and kindness
Everything will be alright if we just keep dancing complaining like we’re 22, 22

Dancing Worrying like 22, yeah, 22, yeah yeah

It feels like one of those nights every other night
We ditch the whole scene and start appreciating our lives more
It feels like another one of those nights
We won’t be sleeping because of assignments 
It feels like another one of those nights
You look like bad news procrastination
I gotta have you, I gotta have you

Here, allow me to explain the world to you:

Disclaimer: This post will not explain the whole world to you. It will attempt to explain different types of twenty-somethings living today. But given we’re so incredibly self-involved and self-obsessed, the whole world really centres around us anyway.

Being young is exhausting work.

Everyone knows that teenagers and twenty-somthings are a different species. Media outlets today are rife with articles analysing and complaining about Gen Y and then subsequently trying to categorise and fix us. Clearly, we’re a complicated case that needs to be studied to ever be successfully eradicated understood.

So in the interest of science, I will thus seek to provide an insight into the mind and culture of a twenty-something. This will hopefully fulfil the twin functions of expanding the horizon of human knowledge and clarifying the questions my mind has about a culture I belong to, know absolutely nothing about yet claim to be an expert in.

An image that makes sense to Gen Y.

So let’s start by confirming that everyone is indie.
I see the confused look on your face so I’m going to stop right there and clarify:
According to urban dictionary Indie is:
1. (n) An obscure form of rock which you only learn about from someone slightly more hip than yourself.
2. (adj) Indie is cooler than emo.

This begs the question, what is an emo?
1. (n) An entire subculture of people (usually angsty teens) with a fake personality.
2. (adj) Like a goth, only much less dark and much more Harry Potter.

Now just to clarify, not everyone who falls under ’emo’ is actually an emo.  There are wemos, which are wannabe emos, and memos, which are mistaken emos. The latter is someone who is not an emo but is confused for one. I can’t personally explain how this happens but apparently it does.

Moving on, there are also lads:
1. (n) A lad is a male who specialises in creating and distributing exquisite banter.
2. (n) Males who like polo shirts and have a penchant for exposing genitalia and being a douchebag.

Now just for the record, ‘chavs’ are young lads.

And to complement the chavs, there are teeny-boppers:
1. (n) Stupid girls of ages 10-14 who squeal and giggle so much that Satan is willing to drag them back to hell.
2. (n) Females who wear small denim shorts no matter the season, are obsessed with pop-punk bands, are desperate to grow up and are unable to structure a sentence without using the word ‘like’ 5 times.
3. (n) The ethnic group Hitler would focus on instead if he were alive today.

An accurate description of how I feel when I’m around teeny-boppers.

There are also modern day hippies:
1. (n) An overgrown child who may occasionally abuse drugs and alcohol to cope with their impossible ideals in the modern world.
2. (adj) An urban hillbilly.

And who could forget the gym-junkies:
1. (adj) People with a Hulk like physique and intelligence level.
2. (n) Members of a society driven by the slogan “get shredded or die trying”.
3. (n) People who use the terms ‘looking ripped’, ‘nice rig’ and ‘do you even lift’ at least once in every sentence.

Now I can’t possibly write an academically sound piece about sub-cultures without mentioning the following:
There are wiggers (white guys who think they are black), chiggers (Chinese guys who think they are black) and hasians (hot asians).
There are skinny guys, who suffer from manorexia, and browned up girls who suffer from tanorexia.
There are stoners who smoke the sacred herb and look like Jesus and there are coke-heads who are people fortunate enough to have enough money to support a devils-dandruff addiction.
Devils dandruff is cocaine, and how this comes up in conversation is beyond me.

There are geeks, whose IQ’s exceed their weights but they’re not to be confused with nerds who are people you’ll end up working for when you grow up.
There are also punks who are rebellious hooligans with funny hair and gangstas’ who have street cred and are unable to find sweat shirts that aren’t 5 sizes too big for them. They’re also not to be confused with thugs although I struggle to understand why.

Now this educational and mildly nauseating journey through sub-cultures leads us to the Hipster: the ultimate sub-culture enigma.
1. Definitions are too mainstream.
2. (n) Someone who listens to bands you’ve never heard of, wears ironic tee-shirts and has a hair style that can only be described as ‘complicated’.
3. (n) An individual who hates corporations and everything mainstream, yet still buys Apple products.
4. (n) A mainstream label referring to someone who rejects mainstream labels.
5. Everyone in my masters program.*

My head hurts too much to even begin making an assessment on what it means to be a hipster. Basically, if you walk round my University, everyone you see will qualify under this label. And no one will actually know what it means.

So there you have it. My contribution to society for the week. I am more confused than when I started.  Labels are gloriously vague, unnecessary and potentially damaging. For todays’ twenty-somthing’s, life is confusing enough and everyone is just trying to find a way to fit in.

The roads that we take are merely kaleidoscopic images that shift with every turn of the head. Everyones either lost in the rat race or lost somewhere outside it. I think it goes without saying that it’s easy to make fun of lifestyles and subcultures, but truly understanding them is a different matter. And maybe the reason society can’t understand twenty-something’s is because we can’t (or don’t want to) understand ourselves either.

*Admittedly, this may not be a very descriptive definition – but it’s true nonetheless.

So, what do you want to be when you grow up?

“You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You’re on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who’ll decide where to go…”                                              – Dr. Seuss: Oh The Places You’ll Go!

When I was five, I was certain I wanted to become a ballerina. At seven, I wanted to be a doctor. At ten, I thought becoming a professional singer and joining the Spice Girls was for me. At thirteen I wanted to become a forensic pathologist. At fifteen, a lawyer.
At every stage of my childhood, when someone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I had an answer. And more often than not, it was a different answer to the one I gave the week before. But funnily enough, when I actually ‘grew up’ I started running out of answers.

Through school I’d always been hardworking and studious so with my good grades came a self belief that I could do anything I put my mind to. The only problem was that I didn’t know what that ‘anything’ was. When I graduated high school I was offered a scholarship to a top University and took it with open arms assuming that when I finished my undergraduate degree I’d be a grown up and thus know what I wanted to be.
I’ve finished my undergraduate degree, but I’m still no ‘grown up’.

The past few years have seen me go through many phases of self discovery. I’ve met incredibly diverse people and travelled to exotic and contrasting parts of the world. I have found myself a thousand times only to realise a week later that the person I found was just one facet on myself rather than a whole. I’ve been surprised by my abilities, disappointed at my failures and encouraged by my resilience. I’ve experienced highs climbing mountains – both physically and metaphorically, near death experiences at the hands of hippos and extreme lows which have left me drunkenly analysing my life at 11am on weekday more times than I wish to admit.

But after all that I still don’t think I am any closer to figuring out what I want to be when I grow up. To be honest, the only thing I have figured out so far is that I don’t think I want to grow up.

No doubt, most twenty-somethings reading this would know the exact feeling I’m trying to describe. None of us can change the decisions that have brought us to where we are right now: the job we have, the city we live in and the path we’re on. But we do have control over the future. After all, we’re twenty-something, not eighty-something, which means that we have a lot more life still to live and quite a few more chances to get it right. There is no such thing as ‘too little too late’ in regards to learning a lesson or creating a life that makes you happy.

I think the biggest obstacle people face is fear. We are afraid that there is something wrong with us because we aren’t happy with where we’ve ended up; despite the carefully calculated plan we followed to get there. We’re frightened of the uncertainty of the future and thought that no one else is feeling the need to walk out of their current life and start over. We’re increasingly scared with each passing thought of a new beginning, that our decisions will be frowned upon and those we love the most may not be proud of us when the dust settles. And not to mention, we all become a little more fearful and crazy when our constant need to compare ourselves to others only serves to illuminate our own faults and shortcomings.

It’s all pretty scary. But I don’t have the ability to erase the fear or a step-by step guide to a solution. But maybe that’s a good thing as calculated paths are what got some of us to this point in the first place. We followed specific plans until we landed in a place so far removed from what makes up happy that we forgot where our passion lives; so far down the wrong path that we can’t even figure out what we want to be when we ‘grow up.’

At the end of the day, I think if we’re all superbly honest with one another (and ourselves) we’d soon find out that none of us are certain about much. We’re not alone and we’re all just trying to figure it out without screwing too much up in the process. We need to set happiness as our only goal and learn that the key to life is making yourself proud. I’m not sure if or how it’ll all work out, but I have faith that what’s meant to be, will be.

The reason for my reflective-state-of-mind, if you will, is that I’ve recently been accepted into a Masters program. After working so hard to get into the program, I’m now left second-guessing whether I truly want to be in it. I suppose part of it is fear of change and fear of the unknown.
It’s safe to say though, that I’m not sure if I’ll ever figure out what I want to be when I grow up. I still just hope that I will never have to grow up but rather have an entire lifetime to exhaust all resources and opportunities to figure out who I am and what makes me happy.

If the past few years have taught me anything it’s that we never stop changing. Life is about mastering the ability to continually keep going after what you really want; having the courage to always start over when you aren’t happy and acquiring the knowledge that you’re not alone in the process.

John Lennon credited his mother for telling him that happiness was the key to life. At school when a teacher asked Lennon to write down what he wanted to be when he grew up, he wrote down ‘happy.’ Lennon said “They told me I didn’t understand the assignment and I told them they didn’t understand life.”

I just hope I can continue to grow old and learn; all the while never growing up or out of happiness.

What it’s like to be a twenty-something as told by Mean Girls, Bridesmaids and Girls.

Golly gosh, I love the inter-webs.
I found this little gem on them and just had to share it.
Kudos, BuzzFeed.

If you’re a twenty-something you probably feel like this:

College was all like:

But now you’re all like: 

And…

Most of the time you just want to yell at the universe.

Because no one understands you. 

With boys, it’s like:

But with your girlfriends is more like: 

And every time you say to a boy:

He’s just like: 

At which point you’re like: 

And in the end, you don’t even want a boyfriend because:

So I guess what I’m saying is that being in your twenties is hard.
Most of the time is feels like this: 

Because the problem is: 

But at the end of the day, you’re only twenty-somthing so you should be doing this:

To see the whole story, you can head to the BuzzFeed article here.