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The first thing I want to do this week is thank everyone who's sent me e-mail. When Dan (my dope editor) and I first started talking about all this, I insisted on having a "mailto" link in my byline so that I could correspond with my readers. But I had no idea how many of you would write me! I wish I could write back to each and every one of you, but I just can't. I will devote one of my future columns to answering the best letters I get. I do want to say something to that creepy orthodontist who wrote me, though: If you think I'm going to use my column to advertise your crazy retainers and headgear, you've been breathing in too much second-hand nitrous oxide.
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By
Tyler Valdez
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There was an article in the paper this week about how if you graduate from college you're set for life. The world will be perfect, you'll always be happy, and you'll never have to worry about anything ever again. Someone — me, for instance — can not only land a $45,000 a year job right out of school, but I can even get a $5,000 signing bonus and a free vacation in Cancun (or some other over-populated tourist trap) before I even sit down in my cubicle.
But when I graduate from college, will I really be set for life? Or if I am, at what price? It's not like you can major in whatever you want, or what you think is important, anymore. You have to study business and finance, not literature and writing, to land those cushy jobs. But the media makes it seem like, because unemployment is so low right now, you can work at whatever kind of job you want and still rake in the Benjamins. What if you don't want to work at an investment firm? Does anyone hand out signing bonuses and tropical vacations to writers, painters, or choreographers? Do employers come to campus to recruit Comp Lit majors?
When I tell my friends and teachers that I want to major in creative writing, everyone says, "That's great, but why not major in something useful? After all, you can read those books any time you want, but it's much harder to learn economics or computer science by yourself." Even my parents — who both went to grad school — say that. People treat you like you're an idiot if you don't want to devote your life to landing a high-paying job when you've only had your driver's license for six months. Hello? I can't even parallel park!
When you're a teenager you should be thinking about what you want to do, you should be dreaming dreams of a world that you invent. You shouldn't be thinking, "Well, I'm going to have to settle for being an accountant." Middle-aged people want to be young again, so why are we middle-aged already? We're supposed to be longing for adventure — not longing for 401(k) plans. Everyone knows that, and they should admit it to themselves.
I know, I know. It's OK for me to say this, because my parents are white-collar. I'm not going to descend to that level and argue about which of us grew up poorer, or how much money my family has. The fact is, a society where people who are young are forced to worry about the hard, cruel facts of the capitalist business world, and forget about everything else, is a messed-up society. A society that rewards college graduates with little bonuses, like trained seals being tossed sardines, for sacrificing the prime of their lives, is not just a sick society, it's a dull one.
I'll get off my soapbox now. I was going to talk about the question, "What happens to the cultural life of America when only people in big business get to live decent lives?" but I won't. Instead, I'll talk about my own goals. In one of the books I read in English last semester (I think it was "Song of Solomon" by Toni Morrison), a character says, "You cannot read what has not been written." I know that sounds obvious, but it struck me as being kind of profound. People think a lot of important stuff all the time, and if they wrote it down it might change the way other people think, too. People are scared of what they think, and they don't want to put it down on paper, because once it's in black and white it might change the world. Someone has to write down what no one else wants to say. I don't think there's any money in that, though.
After the last episode of "Seinfeld," all the kids in my English class were talking about it. Most of them thought it was dumb, and even those of us who liked it didn't get the point of the ending. But my English teacher, Mr. Scirpo, talked about how there's something bleak about television writing anyway, so why shouldn't it be like that? He pointed out how the ending was like a play called "No Exit," by the French philosopher Sartre. It's about people who live their lives in ways they know they really shouldn't, and then get punished when they die by being trapped in a room with other people just like them, forever. That got me thinking.
Even though nobody I know knows about Sartre's play, there's a link between it and an episode of a TV show that millions and millions of people watched and talked about the next day. Sure, if you decide to be an investment analyst, you can get all this money and they can send you to some tropical island so you can act like a jerk for a week, but that doesn't matter. The people with those $45,000 a year jobs are like the characters in "No Exit" and "Seinfeld." But if you write something like "No Exit," or the last episode of "Seinfeld," you might make something that lasts forever. Plus, you might make a lot of money doing it. I bet Sartre did.
This is the second issue of Tyler's Mad Crib. Catch up on what you missed in Tyler's archive.
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