Its been a year since I graduated. I find it interesting to compare where I was then and where I am now. Last year, I was eager to get out and go make videogames, something I had spent the last for years learning how to program in order to do. I was going to be out of my parent’s house by September, living in a city, meeting new people and doing new and interesting things. That was last year. Of those initial ambitions, I achieved very few of them. Immediately when i started looking, I realized that i did not know the appropriate languages to be a programmer in the videogame industry. I managed to move out to New York in September, but due to the collapse of Western Civilization, I couldn’t stay there, and moved back to my parent’s house in January. While that technically could consider that attaining my initial goal, the movement was lateral at best. On jobs, i gave up on programming, deciding that I would try being a paralegal before going into law school. After several more failed attempts at getting a job in that field, as well as a very good discussion about my prospects with a friend who was already in law, I tried to move to the nonprofit sector. After moving back to DC, I continued to try looking for a job there while also eyeing Capitol Hill. Finally, 10 months after I got my diploma from a well respected college, I have managed to get an unpaid internship with a Congressional Representative. When I compare this to my friends who have been working and on their own since the afternoon of graduation, it leaves me feeling somewhat lacking as a productive human being.
Earlier today, I was listening to my iTunes while wasting time, and I heard a song I have had stashed away since Sophomore year. It was a disintegration loop. A disintegration loop is a sound loop that, while being transferred from tape to digital storage, started to fall apart as it was being transferred. The musical loop is very simple, several gauzy notes and and ambient fuzz, but as it disintegrates, it transforms. The music takes on an air of melancholy as parts of the loop dropp out, very subtly at first, so much so as you can only hear it if you listen very closely. But over the course of time, the missing tape flecks become more and more pronounced, the sound clipping as the recorder tries to make up for the loss. The loop also changes, it transforms from what it originally was as it keeps repeating and decaying, becoming increasingly gaunt and piecemeal until eventually there is nothing left of it. The whole effect of listening to them is akin to witnessing the dying breaths of a colossus, or watching a house fall into ruin and eventually fall apart in the rain over time. It is not a happy thing.
As I listened to the long forgotten loop on my computer today, I came to the realization that I had begun to feel like the loop. The plans I had made for myself one year ago, which were fairly grand for my idea of adulthood, slowly decayed as the time wore on. Bits and pieces of them fell away as everyone I knew got jobs and moved on with their lives, while it felt I was merely in a holding pattern. And as this pattern kept going, my plans fell apart, changing as each piece was scraped off. Looking at it now, I would never have seen myself here a year ago. Things have changed so steadily that I didn’t even realize it until I remebered that graduation season was coming around again. I wonder how I will look back at this point next year. Will I still feel like i am in a holding pattern, things falling apart with the steady passage of time? Or will I manage to get out of my rut? This is not me trying to be completely self pitying, although it does sound like a whiny emo teenager. Its a rainy, depressing day, and I just want to get out of my disintegration loop.
