Parents Weekend, seen from the library windows

Down to forty-three days until May 25th, graduation day and it's Parents Weekend. Parents weekend is by and large a day of events for underclassmen parents, creating a strange juxtoposition for seniors as we sit holed up in the library finishing our theses.

Parents come and freshmen students show them around--this is the library, this is my dorm room, this is the english department; the underlying message is: this is Vassar, this is my home. For me (and if I can speak for other seniors, for us) it's a indisputable reminder that Vassar will not be my home for very much longer. This realization, a mild existential crisis, inspires a feeling akin to panic as I watch skinny shirtless boys tossing frisbees on Joss Beach from the Reading Room.

I know it's not quite time for sad sentimentality (give it another 20 days), but I can't help but wonder, did I cherish it enough?

Switching from a backward glance to a forward-focused one, yesterday my mom and I had a "check-in" about my plans for next year. I didn't get into the grad school programs I wanted, much to my own and others surprise (I say this only in a impotent attempt repair my broken ego..) I've applied for some jobs but no word yet; A response about the English Teaching Assistantship Fulbright in Italy is still looming.

Last week I was contacted by a popular national magazine company about applying to a fellowship program in D.C. It was one of those moments where it seems like its all coming together, like "yes, this is finally it, this is what its going to be."

And while, yes, it's possible that it may just be "the one," to be punny, this is also roughly the 10th time in 6 months that I've thought a potential path for the future was THE path. Basically I fall in love too fast and then am rejected, except here I'm talking about employers, not boys. I can't afford to be let down again, I'm just too cut up over the last 20 applications that took 10 hours to complete. I can't take another let down after being forced to distill my existence into a 250 word essay about why I'm so fabulous.

I wish I could rewind not four years, but about 4 or 5 months--back to a time where possibility was still endless in my mind and unfettered by the obvious reality that the Associated Press is not going to hire me in June. Those were the golden days. That though my Vassar degree will indeed take me somewhere some day, it's not going to be in forty-five days, but over the course of years. And its fine, really.

My mom suggested we have a little family party back in Syracuse after I'm done. All I could imagine when she said this was me, sitting at a picnic table holding my gold-leaf imprinted degree and being asked over and over and over again the question dreaded by all of the Class of 2008 around the world: "So what are your plans for next year?"

I wake up in a cold sweat from nightmares about that question. I think there's a special circle in Dante's Inferno reserved for sadistic adults who enjoy asking unsuspecting graduates that question--somewhere between gluttony and lust. Mostly because above all else, I'm constantly asking myself that question, and am as thirsty for an answer to it and as much without it as Statius in Purgatorio.