I haven't worked in almost two weeks, and I'm not taking summer school. Already I'm beginning to feel the pressure of society. Today I watched Dr. Phil with my mom, it was an episode on moochers. After that was Oprah, an episode on women struggling with being overweight. Being the overweight brutha that I am and living at home with my folks, it's needless to say this afternoon had me feeling like a fat slob. The McDonald's dinner didn't help. Nor did my mom, questioning whether I even still work for the bank. Nor did the frequent questioning by my friends, "So where are you working this summer?" as though I had lost my job at TD or something. Nor did the repeated memories of my having no money. Nor did waking up this morning to a call from a hiring agency that wanted me to comment on a friend of mine, who just got a job. Nor did pretty much any conversation I've had in the last 2 weeks with friends, about them getting back to school or to work, as though this year will be any harder than last.
But, I can make enough excuses for now. Honestly, job-searching last summer was a waste of time; I spent so much time looking for work, it was like a fulltime job with no pay. I'm not going to bother looking for a second job to commit to this summer. I'm just going to bully myself into getting as many hours as possible. I can take comfort in having a job. I can do like most of my friends and absorb myself in my current low-level, do-nothing position and comfort myself with the resulting marginal level of financial security. Or I could plunge myself further into debt, and take up the odd course at school and take comfort in the fact that "I'm in school" and that I don't need to worry about the future, just yet. And, with the added pressure I put on myself to finish school early I relieve myself of the pressure of failure, because if I do poorly than I must have pushed myself too much, too fast. I have to admit, any and all of these excuses seem like golden opportunities right about now, mostly because like most undergrads my age I'm quite insecure.
But, unlike most undergrads I think my level of insecurity is a bit more dangerous. I was feeling the supposed 'quarter-life crisis' symptoms in about grade 12/OAC. And like most people who come of out university, pull up their bootstraps and throw themselves into a secure job, I came out of highschool, pulled up my bootstraps and threw myself into a secure program, Co-op BBA. After almost 2 years of blogging, anyone reading this now probably already knows how I feel about the BBA, and Coop, and well UofT in general. But let me get back to my insecurity.
I'm sitting here, almost finished my program with mediocre marks, and slightly above average experience, work and volunteer wise. An undergraduate degree these days is slightly better than a dime-a-dozen highschool diploma, probably somewhere around a quarter-a-dozen. Furthermore, my degree (keeping with the fact that I'm university's B- student) is even less special than about half of the people in the room, in any given classroom. So as much as university is supposed to offer four years of the social safety net and the crafted skills to enter the workforce and make myself feel more secure, I find that with every passing day I'm regressing further into a pit of insecurity.
Some people like to blame this kind of pressure with going to UofT, or being in a competitive program, or having added outside stressors in their lives, like shitty time-consuming part-time jobs. Seriously though, everyone has work and shit to deal with. Competing now is easier than competing later on with no experience. And honestly, we UofT folk aren't much different than the rest. At Ryerson you find out you're mediocre after you get your degree with high marks and the industry doesn't really care. At UofT, you find out that you're mediocre every step of the way, after every depressing exam. Management was a bust for me, I knew that was coming, but I thought there would be salvation in economics. I still like economics a lot, but success in econ seems slim. Maybe I can put my minor in philosophy to good use!
"What can you do with a degree in philosophy?"
"Have deep thoughts about being unemployed!"
-Dragon, The Bruce Lee Story
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