Aggrandizement

23 September 2006
Arsenal 3 - 0 Sheffield United

63' Gallas
69' Jagielka (og)
80' Henry

And now back to me. I quit my transitional retail job a couple weeks ago and seemingly relentless waves of depression are washing at my shores again. I thought if I moved into some kind of office job that the depression would leave. I would be able to settle into the post-college lifestyle that so many of my older friends have modeled for me. Yet it hasn't happened. The job itself pleases me much more, but that only goes to show how much I didn't like working retail. Maybe it's because I haven't moved out yet: I come home from work exhausted, help my mom make dinner, then watch sports and sit at my computer until it's time I should have gone to bed thirty minutes ago. The worst part about it all is that I don't do any of the stuff I thought about doing while at work: I don't even play video games. I dream about playing games, I dream about writing and watching movies yet when I get home I sit around and just kind of stare into space. I watch TV sure but not religiously, it's just on. I'm not sure where all my time goes and it's massively depressing. The best nights are when I can eke out some writing like this here but they only come when inspired (which is luckily a couple times a week). College is this crazy wild party time and it's awesome, it's fantastic and fun and stimulating, yet post-college is this massive drop-off in comparison and suddenly everything has slowed down. My mom was talking a week ago about my birthday (which itself was two days ago) and we made jokes about me being thirty and having a huge party and then I frowned because thirty is only eight years off. I guess there are some of you out there laughing at me but eight isn't that far when you're used to it being something like fifteen years away. There are some moments in life that sports can not protect you from or prepare you for and this is one of them. The only feeling this compares to in sports is when a great player retires: watching Andre Agassi walk off the US Open courts recently stung as much as leaving college did. The same sense of an era closing is present and it overwhelms you; much like watching Agassi talk to the crowd on that day, walking on my Graduation Day is a moment I don't think I will ever fully come to terms with. This crisis finds roots in a lot of what I have talked about up until this point: not knowing our place in the universe, my fear of never being published, and so on. The building blocks are slowly becoming visible, and indeed as I imagine them my mood improves. Over here to my right is existentialism and to my left is society. On top of existentialism is desire and top of society is experience, and then on the third level in between the two is sport, and above sport is everyday life. We are beginning to understand the world as I see it, humanity as I feel it. My mom tells me I need to get a girlfriend but I think that would just complicate the mess: my future girlfriend occupies a space somewhere in between desire and life and I just don't have any energy to try to squeeze her in there right now. You know, some people like change and some people don't. I don't, not really - it takes me a long time to get accustomed to a situation, longer than for normal people I suspect anyhow, and once I do get adapted, I'm pretty loathe to change it because I'd really rather not have to go through that process again. That pattern has repeated itself throughout my life. I hated to go to a new school for fourth grade (in fact, I hated leaving California after second grade, and then leaving Ohio after third!), and then I was beset with nervous anxiety about going to middle school (after all, only a couple more years and then high school!), and then we left California again right before I started high school! That was the hardest of all - not the worst, mind you, but the hardest. It took me years to fully adapt to high school on a completely different coast. It took me years to truly accept my friends; indeed that did not even happen until high school was over. Going to college was not nearly as bad, although it was pretty nerve-wracking - it felt much more like an extension of high school than something entirely new. It helped that I ended up only going to uni about forty-five minutes away from home: I went home every weekend, and could see my high school friends when they came home from college. I reaped the benefits of my struggles in high school as I befriended more people faster and had removed a substantial portion of my awkward personality (although it is still always here - charmingly so, yes?). By the end of college, I couldn't bear to leave, and it presented an enormous emotional struggle. I had a lot of friends in college, but the ones I hung out with the most lived on the opposite side of campus. I have a lot of memories of walking home from their place and passing the George Mason statue, bathed in a number of lights, knowing I would miss the campus more than I had ever expected. That came true; recently I've been pining for the days of last year, where I would get completely plastered with my friends and wake up at seven in the morning with a spinning head on their couch. Stumble home amidst the constant construction to buildings that won't be complete until 2008. Sack out in my own bed only to wake up around noon with a parched mouth and a pounding headache. I look back on the times we spent staying up ‘til five while rocking out to some of the greatest music we knew with the fondest of eyes, I remember drunkenly playing games and getting ourselves in trouble with everyone: the security guards and other residents alike. Life was perfect because we knew who we were (drunken college students!), we knew what we were supposed to be doing (learning, fucking around!), and that was all there was to it. We reveled in our evolution, we reveled in our freedom. That freedom is gone for now. I suppose it may return once I move out to a place with my friend Kevin in a week (guess what I'll talk about next weekend?), but until then my life has this caged-in feeling, as if I have to rein in what I want to do - and what I do do. I'm nervous about moving, but I'm also excited. It represents some of my first true independence, although I'm only moving about twenty minutes away from home, and it presents an opportunity to completely do whatever I want. Of course, the only plans I have right now are to drink heavily and play video games. I intend to drown the coming year in beer and good times, potentially the last real chance I have to live like this. The real question is, when I turn 23 and am looking for a new house, will I look back on the 06/07 Arsenal season and wish I could do it all over again? I wish I could live college all over again, and it's hard to ignore how the football season wraps around the seasons of my life. I can almost feel the depression from late 2007; what's terrifying is that, this aversion to change that dejects me, I wonder if this is how I will spend the last years of my life? You know, when I'm puttering around at the ripe old age of seventy, a pint of beer in my hand and my vintage 06/07 Van Persie jersey (which my dad just got me for my birthday - greatest present ever!) over my skinny wrinkled bod, will I be assailed by waves of compunction? Will I want to do it all over again? It's funny that I'm despondent because I want to do it all over again: not because I'd change what I did, but because I do not want it to end. The ephemerality of life is what saddens me. Getting a job and an apartment depress me only insofar as they signify moving on: they are the final nail in the coffin, the final cue that college is over. I'll spend the next year trying to recreate college but it will not be the same, it can never be the same again, and in that sense I am already a little dead. I know, as the Leopard knows, that I will not die of cancer or heart disease, although they will say I did: I will die of these constant sadnesses, of having to leave something behind that I truly loved. Every time I do that I die somewhat and someday it will be too much: I will simply keel over, determined never to give anything up again.