Don't Worry, It Gets Worse Read online

  Today begins “the rest of your life.” The “real world.” The realization of “Holy shit, my parents are going to stop paying my phone bill soon.” It’s supposed to be an exciting day, but I’m going to take a shot in the dark and assume that most of you are extremely bored and possibly hungover right now. If that’s the case—congratulations. You will spend many mornings of the next few years in this very state, so why not get a jump-start on it now? Sorry, parents.

  However annoyed you graduates are to be sitting here—checking the pamphlets to see how many more speeches you have to listen to, wondering whether or not you should throw your hat up in the air, contemplating what hand to shake the dean of students with (it’s the right—or am I fucking with you?)—there’s another emotion brewing in you today that I’m going to ask you to hold on to desperately.

  Hope.

  I know, I know, you were expecting me to say “hope.” Everybody here was waiting for me to say “hope,” but, hey, all the crap television shows you love are chock-full of clichés, too, so I feel like you can stick with me on this one. By god, men, you are going to need HOPE, and a hell of a lot of it, to get through the next few years. Things are about to get a little weird.

  A few years ago, I was sitting right where you are sitting. I had spent the night before commencement dancing to Vitamin C’s graduation song in my underwear, drinking whiskey out of the bottle and celebrating the fact that I would never have to read SparkNotes, or sit next to the obnoxious classmate who would constantly ask the professor questions, or run into the guy I hooked up with at the only frat party I ever attended ever again. The next morning, I woke up too late to get a breakfast burrito, put some blush on so my grandmother wouldn’t tell me how pale I looked, and headed to graduation, feeling excited and nervous.

  When I got to the ceremony, though, I couldn’t believe how bored I was. I thought graduation was supposed to feel big and important, and instead I was hot and cranky. This was a huge moment, I thought. Why does it feel like just another long line, waiting for something else to happen?

  Then, they called my name. I heard cheers and knew my mother and father were grinning and taking pictures and my friends were whooping at me because I did it. At that moment, I felt a surge of something real, something exhilarating. A real rush of pleasure, like the way you might feel when you think about signing a new lease in a new city, or meeting the person you might fall in love with, or landing your dream job. And that feeling? That’s the emotion I want you to hold on to—that surge of hope and promise and newness and excitement for everything the future holds for you.

  That is because a couple of months from now, you will feel frustrated. You will receive your first loan check in the mail and wonder why you need to pay for something that you no longer receive. You will have trouble finding a job and will become jealous of others when they land one. You will not be able to afford the clothes you want or the amount of drinks you want or the vacation you think you are owed. Perhaps most depressingly, you will start eating more ramen noodles than you ever did in college.

  And this is when you need hope for the future. This is when you will need to test your character much more than you did inside these four walls, when you need to buckle up and hold on to hope more than ever before. Your life will feel scary and gross and uncertain, like you will never have a safety net again.

  Not so—you are your own safety net once you graduate. Embrace what makes you stronger, because while college made you wiser, real life makes you tougher. See what you can do with this. Never forget the high you got as you walked across the stage, not because you were graduating, but because you were excited for the things to come.

  You are here because you want to do something important. You are here because you have a dream you want to achieve, and that is going to become increasingly easy to forget about when things get hard. Do not forget why you came here four years ago and stayed till this afternoon.

  To practice not forgetting, I am going to give you a homework assignment. Obviously getting a homework assignment on the day you’re officially free from academia is something you’ll roll your eyes at, but I promise you, this homework will be way more important than any of the exams and final papers you did at this college: Do better.

  That’s it. Constantly try to do better. Push yourself to do better than you did the day before. I’m telling you this because there are certainly going to be times when you’re not going to want to do better; you might not want to do anything but sulk. You think it was bad when you were pulling all-nighters in college? Don’t worry, it gets worse.

  Some of you will work retail after college. Some of you will get paid next to nothing to be somebody’s assistant. Some of you will feel like your life is in the shitter, and you will wish to be back at this very college. Don’t become stagnant—even if you’re working at a fry station, the worst thing you can do with your life now is to become stagnant in it. Nobody is telling you what to do anymore—you are your own teacher, your own boss, your own captain. You have to constantly push yourself to get better, or else you will get stuck. You are too smart and too bright and spent too much money at this school to get stuck. Do better. Become a mental athlete. Push yourself so much it’s sickening. Stagnant water is full of mosquitoes, remember that.

  Now, here comes the point of the speech where I had googled “What kind of uplifting quote can I use so I don’t sound so goddamn depressing.” I know a lot of speeches have quotes in them, and I didn’t want to disappoint you. However, the only quote I could think of was the one Christopher Walken gave in the movie Catch Me if You Can, about the mouse drowning in the cream until it churned into butter. That’s a good one, but I’m not getting paid enough for this speech to grace you with my Walken impression.

  I’ll tell you why I don’t want to give you a quote—quotes by famous people make you think that nothing inspirational will ever be said again. Quotes by famous people make you think that everything worth saying has already been said. That’s not why we’re here today. We’re here today because you are the ones who are supposed to be saying those inspirational quotes—you are supposed to be creating and marking this world and changing this world you are about to enter.

  Create your own shit. Be your own inspiration. Work your ass off.

  You may have worked hard in college, but that’s nothing compared to what’s going to come. I am here to tell you that you will work harder now than ever before because you have to work with fear. You haven’t been used to working with fear. You’ve been living in a little hut of comfort here at college. That hut is about to be eaten by Godzilla. Let me tell you something—staying up all night working on a paper about Malcolm X ain’t got shit on staying up all night wondering if you will run out of money.

  However, there’s a good thing about the fear. The fear makes things more fun.

  The next couple of years are going to be the best, most alive of your life. Now, I know they said this when you were graduating high school, and then they said it about the college years, but I think that is because life is always getting better. Really, the postcollege years will be some of the most fun you’ll ever have.

  You’ll find people, friends, and family who you stick with not because you are in the same classes but because you want these people to be your buddies in combat. They will meet you for lunch when you are worried about having HPV or getting fired. They will be your lifeboat, your 2 A.M. phone call, your “I like you because you understand me and not because we are in Lit 101 together.”

  You will lose touch with people you thought you wouldn’t, watch from a distance while these people get married, gain weight, lose weight, move across the country, and get new sets of friends you will never meet. But you will look at your pictures of them and remember the nights you drank too much rum with them and you will enjoy those moments immensely. You will know what it is like to experience true nostalgia—the feelings a Hot Pocket can elicit will be astounding. It will not be a bittersweet kind
of thing, because you know that it’s not as much growing apart as it is growing up.

  There will be successes, and failures, and a lot of good and bad things. You will watch yourself and the people you choose to be with fall in love and get married, get jobs, get fired, get a terrible tattoo, have babies, get sick, get better, get worse, lose parents, grow older, grow smarter. Things will flash forward, pass before your eyes like the lights at a terrible nightclub.

  You will feel more alive now than ever before, this I promise you. Grab this time before it goes away.

  So when you are sitting here, in your last moments of being in college, do not savor them like your life is ending. Look forward to that next step because it’s going to come anyway. When you walk across that stage, do it with your head held high.

  Get ready to make a contribution. Want to make a contribution to this world, because I’ve already said enough depressing things and I don’t need to tell you that you are going to die, but, hey, you are. So make your mark, dammit. Don’t lie there on your couch and fester. Put on your shoes and step out in the world and make something happen. Take what you love, and try to mark your headstone with something like “I was here. I did SOMETHING.”

  So, guys, stop looking so bored today.

  Wake up.

  Welcome.

  A Friend Sits on the Hitchin’ Post

  When I got my friend Karen’s wedding invitation in the mail, I put it down on my coffee table and accidentally spilled nail polish on it. Glitter nail polish. Somewhere, I thought, Karen was out there choosing china patterns while her friend and peer was fumbling with the kind of cosmetic that children wear. I wiped the nail polish off and decided to stick to matte colors from now on. Hell, if my friends were taking leaps, I would at least take baby bounds.

  The invitation stayed firmly in my hand for a lengthy amount of time as I noted the thickness of the paper, wondered how long it took her to choose its particular shade of green. Just moments later, though, I used it to write down my aunt’s e-mail address, because, Alida, can you just e-mail her a nice little paragraph about your life? It only takes five minutes and I know that you are always on the Internet and you are also a writer and this should not be that hard for you. After an estimated eight minutes involving a quick summation of summer movies I thought my aunt should see, I examined the invite again and then lightly tossed it down on the table, telling myself I would respond tomorrow. (Sure, Alida, that’s realistic.) It was visible for at least a day, but eventually fell underneath bills and the latest issue of a magazine we stole from our neighbors. Out of nowhere one afternoon, uncomfortably close to the RSVP date, I suddenly remembered its existence again. I waved the now slightly tattered, coffee-stained, glittery invitation at my roommates.

  “Guys! Somebody we know—somebody our age is getting married!” We had never seen one of these before—a wedding invite mailed to us and not our parents, a noncousin affair we had to provide our own transportation to. I hoped they would shed some light on what we were all supposed to feel about it. Happy? Biological clock ticking? Filled with the prodding fear of dying alone? We weren’t too old to be expecting them to come in the next few years, we concluded, but we felt too young to be receiving them now.

  “Well, of course you have to go,” my roommates said. “Do you think you’ll have to buy her a TOASTER? Do you think one of our buds will get so drunk and make a speech? Do you think there will be salmon canapés?” My roommates had not been to a “friend wedding” yet, so I was the sacrificial pioneer. I promised to report back my findings, as long as my roommate Amanda came with me. I wasn’t sure if I was ready to field this alone.

  Karen was not the black sheep in the marriage race. She wasn’t in the “total lack of surprise” category, as she wasn’t super religious, or pregnant, or dying, or dating somebody who was dying. I rated her engagement at “small level of surprise” because she was very nice and very committed to Jack and also very committed to making baked goods. She was an acceptable, comfortable start to the inevitable domino effect of friends getting married, the first lilac bouquet in a series of lilac bouquets, the start of a storm of rice throws and tux rentals and Cancun honeymoons.

  * * *

  I have always pictured my own wedding. I realize that as a girl, the patriarchal society wants us to do this so we will focus more on the charming effect a bouquet of daisies can have and less about how much less money we make than men. However, we’re all feminist enough here to understand that it is perfectly acceptable for a woman of my age to imagine a lovely field with food trucks and those lantern lights you buy at Crate and Barrel and bridesmaids in black polka-dot dresses. I can tell you how much I would like a first dance with one spin followed by a dance-off to Montell Jordan’s “This Is How We Do It.” I can tell you how I’m leaning toward red lipstick, as long as I find one that doesn’t smudge. I would mention how I fully expect a bulldog in a top hat to be in attendance, but I don’t want you stealing my idea.

  I like thinking about the details, of the party itself—but as I grow older and I learn more and more about how marriage is a combination of assets and also I’m single, I find my own wedding fantasies waning. So in my daydreams, I’m more often than not thinking of someone else’s wedding. I’d much rather envision the wedding of one of my good friends, because I very much anticipate attending a wedding of which I am an integral part. I like to imagine myself in an olive-green silk dress with a well-fitted bodice, showing support for a bride I had always known would marry this groom. I deliver a speech with my hair swept to the side, raising my glass of champagne to say: “When Amanda met her future husband, I couldn’t help but worry if it would affect how often she would hang out with me. Luckily, she met a wonderful guy who would also, thank god, listen to my problems as much as she does. That’s when I knew I could deal with this whole ‘situation.’”

  It always seemed like a good angle to make jokes at the beginning of a wedding speech and then ending with a teary-eyed exclamation of their eternal love. Not a dry eye in the house in my wedding fantasies.

  Of course, I also happen to be thirty-two in these fantasies. Not in my twenties. That’s because, in my head, you meet a guy after you’ve been through a bunch of other guys, when you are older and more responsible and able to consider adding another person to your taxes. Still, I could not stop the wedding-gown train of destiny, as there is no going back from the first marriage of a friend. You immediately become the type of person whose friends get married, and you have to start thinking about growing up and getting a pair of smart Nine West heels for occasions such as these. It made you seem older. I take that back: It MADE you older. And just like the thrown bouquet, it’s gonna come at you whether you catch it or not.

  * * *

  I distinctly remember a trip to my friend Dave’s house in western Massachusetts in the winter of 2008. Karen and I were on a train, sitting with our feet perched on the opposite seats, headed to the kind of parents’ house where they didn’t mind “if the kids drank, as long as they didn’t drive afterward.” She was sipping soda out of a comically large cup, picking at French fries because no college student can enter a train station without purchasing fast food. It is part of l’expérience. Her face was youthful and pretty without any makeup. Her midriff was showing and she pulled out a book.

  “So this guy I’m kind of seeing. He gave me a book. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.”

  “He gave you a book about September eleventh? Isn’t that kind of morbid?”

  “I don’t know.” She puts the book back, and I don’t ask her to elaborate.

  Then we proceeded to go to a house where we drank beer out of a large glass boot and I tried to drink out of a funnel and she put on a boy’s fitted cap and we smoked a hookah out in the cold. She never mentioned him again, not once, all weekend.

  Four years later, I got glitter all over the name of the boy who once gave a girl a book about America’s greatest tragedy.

  * * *
/>   As the weeks go by and the wedding looms closer, I think about strange things. Like, for instance, if I married my college boyfriend, I wouldn’t be able to remember the first time we kissed. I make bets on who will get married next. (My money is on a shotgun nuptial for one of my more careless Catholic friends.) And most of all, I wonder if people ever realized when a moment, a glance, a look, was the kind of thing that would jump-start the beginning of another chapter in their life. I was surveying everyone about this.

  “You remember that night, right? The night at Dave’s? She didn’t…know then, right?”

  Brittanie, my ride to the wedding and my friend for everything else, sighs, her voice crackling over the phone. “I don’t know. Probably not. The only thing I remember is discussing the need for females to empower their sexual behaviors by getting tested. We were both very into the preservation of the female body at that time.”

  It is two days before I am supposed to leave in some sort of Honda death trap, driven by her, DJ’d by me. I have iced coffee in my hand and I am by the bodega, pacing.

  “What are you getting them?” she asked.

  “I’m just giving them a check. People our age don’t need candles, they need money.”

  “Great, I don’t have a checkbook. I’m just going to give them cash.”

  “Bee, we’re not in the mob. Why don’t we just give them a joint check or something?”

  “Fine. I’ll get the card. I certainly don’t trust you with the card. What are you wearing?”

  I tell her I don’t know.

  The next day, I spend approximately thirty minutes trying to find a dress that echoes the casual elegance of the invitation. I settle on a black floral number that, while sporting a terrific skirt, had slightly overboard cleavage. Wedding cleavage. I believe it gives me a youthful look, the kind of look that tells people This is all happening to us very fast, I’m still twenty-three.