Post-Collegiate

I want to make a comment on an issue that has become relevant again for me in the laast few weeks.
The curse of "post-college" life is something that my good friend Ian in his blog has commented a lot about, and to me in person, too.
As you are all aware, I have recently, in the month of May 2010, returned from a 15 month jaunt in Japan. All details aside, it was yet another emotional roller coaster, and a hell of a lot of learning and life-experience too.
But now I am back in Australia. For all intents and purposes, in the physical world, I am RIGHT BACK where I started 15 months ago. Living at home in Sydney, unemployed except for the scraps my one English teaching job tosses me once in a while, and looking for a path into my future.
That's in the physical world.

As for the better world, let's call it the mental world, I am in a very different place. "Different" in this case does not mean "totally alien", but more along the lines of "more advanced". If I were to try to draw an easily relatable analogy using something we all know - telephones - it would be like this:
The Tom of 15 months ago was certainly not Alexander Graham Bell's first prototype, but more like the big black and clunky bakelite phones of the mid 20th century. The Tom of Today is akin to an early 2000s, pre-iPhone mobile phone. I am not as sophisticated, stylish, or expensive as an iPhone, but I can get done what I have to do.
To continue the analogy into the ATTITUDE of post-college life, there are some times when I think that I want to be an iPhone. There are also times when I look at other iPhones and think "that's too much, and too much of that is something I do not want".
Obviously, given the hundreds, thousands, or perhaps millions of types of phones that have ever existed since Mr. Bell's first protoype he used to call Mr. Watson, there are that many types of phone that I could be or become. What am I now? Well, like I said above, I believe I am dependable and working, but still prone to collapses of fortitude under odd conditions (but not often, by no means).

I think the phone analogy made my point, so I want to part from it now and get back to more real terms.
I know what I have done. Mito (Japan) taught me a lot about many kinds of things - eg. work, love, making money and living alone, and of course culture and differences.
Japan - the 2010 Expedition - taught me much more enjoyable and lasting lessons about LIFE in general, and the types of lessons that could only be learnt from a 1 1/2 month trek across a foreign land.

But where am I now, and what am I to be?
I guess that is the question, isn't it.
Just the other day I visited a place called Roselands, a shopping centre that has existed since I was a little boy, and to which I and my family frequently went back then. Save for one quick trip in there out of desperation about 2 years ago, I have NOT been to that place for approximately 5 years.
Why did I go this time? Two reasons:
1) I was looking for a new hat rack which didn't exist
2) I was curious to see it after all this time.
And sure enough, disappointment about the hat rack aside, I was surprised to see that the centre had itself changed rather drastically. Shops that I recalled being here or there were gone, colour schemes that dominated large swathes of wall were totally changed, the elevators in the middle of the centre, which were once a marvel because they were so shiny and new, had been completely replaced and upgraded with a very boxy and unimpressive new version, and old shops that were still there had arrogantly changed their names to no avail (not the least because they still sold exactly the SAME stuff - I'm talking about you, Grace Bros. and Myer).
It was interesting to see the changes.
As I wandered into the bowels of the place - towards a shop which is, quite aptly, named the Reject Shop (think social and commercial value, etc.) I felt a tide of suburbia welling around me. The shop itself is largely useless, and nothing more will be said here, but I also wandered past other shops down in that bowel. The 'food court' area refelcted what might be called the "Sub-way revolution" - a term I just coined for these reasons:
1) It started with the quarternary industrial revolution led by the Subway sandwich chain - whereby people go to shopping centres to buy expensive food that they could very, very, VERY easily make at home by themselves, for a small fraction of the cost, if only they were not so damn lazy
2) the prefix "sub-" fits the situation, because the food in these food courts really is below standards (or at least MY standards) for what a decent meal involves, but it is all being proffered to the customer as "healthy", "lo-fat" or "lite" or some other such misspelling that legally misleads casual observers (and, by no stretch, exacerbates the laziness of the consumer)

Let it come as no surprise to you then that I saw NOT ONE person of a healthy weight-range, and more than a majority of them had obese waist-lines that any principled cardiologist would have a cardiac over. I say this bit also with recent memories of being surrounded by skinny Japanese people - mainly puny men, sinewy men, tight-bodied women, or malnourished children, all due mainly to the fact that RICE consists of about 60% of daily dietary intake. I am aware of this skew on my perspective, let it be known!

And I also walked past a pet-store that has a curious back-story.
Way back in 2008, as I was finishing college, or University, as we only call it Down Under, I was desperate to get a job and start making some money. One sunny Saturday morning, as I was about to head down to another shopping centre and seek a job at a store somewhere, I received a fateful call that spared my arse such a job, and got me into the English-teaching job I do occasionally now. Had that call not come, my first choice at Miranda (the other shopping centre) was to go into a pet store and try to get a job there. Given the choice between the musty, muffled clothes and white walls of Big W or looking at puppies all day, I preferred the latter.
As it turned out, within a fortnight of getting my teaching job, I had noticed that said pet store had closed down and vanished from Miranda. Gone for good, I thought.
But no, apparently they simply relocated to another shopping centre, Roselands, lo and behold!
So, in short, had I taken that job at the time, I could theoretically be working in the same shopping centre where I had visited as kid, and subsequently actively avoided for half a decade, and forgotten about for many more years. And I will not, for the record, EVER got there again, unless a dire emergency should strike the need.
At the age of 23 and given the expereiences I had (and created for myself!) in Japan already, it would be heart-breaking to suffer such a fate. I realise that I have just described the lives of at least a hundred people, or however many are employed at Roselands (and Miranda, because I went there too when I was young!). And I pity them. I really do. Not in any condescending or arrogant way, I simply say that I pity the path that they are trudging through life with that kind of job as a sole means of income.
But this is also a part of the broader matter of 'suburbia' and the tiresome environment that it can become.

Let me keep the focus on ME, for now (it IS my blog!), and just say that I cannot and will not suffer such a fate because I feel and know inside myself that I have much greater potential than to work at Roselands or Miranda for the rest of my life.
Let me also say that I am trying to practice the vigilance to ensure that whatever job I DO get, ever, does not turn into a monetary succubus, sucking the life out of me from the inside for sake of getting a paycheck.

And what this means for me now, at this point in my life - 23, returned from Japan, unemployed but with huge aspirations?
It means that there is a long and confusing path directly ahead of me, one which I must tread wisely and carefully. I must be sure not to fall into a pothole and hobble myself at some given turn in the road and stay there. By this, a good example would be that I should not jump at just ANY job that I can find, for sake of making a buck. I am lucky in that I am sourced from the middle class, and probably the upper end of it, too, because my parents raised me well, instilled the correct values and moral capacity in me, and can even now offer a safe and stable platform for me to base my search for a future.
I should also point out that the same goes for women - or in a more universal sense, the seeking of a significant other in one's life. I will NOT jump on the first woman that smiles at me, or who I set my sights on casually, not without proper thought and "getting-to-know" time at the very least.
Potential is something that I think all people can have, but it only exists if you see it, and it only becomes reality if you realise it.

(Let's all be clear: etymologically, "realise" literally means to make something into reality; "real" meaning Reality, and "-ise" being the verb suffix, connoting in this case an active making or doing of the base before it, hence "to make reality", in the sense of bring it into being int the real world that we all share, and not just inside one's head, or in a psychosis).

Yes, it is good to go for something when an opportunity arises. Yes, it may be good for the cowboys to drink anything when they are tired and thirsty. But NO, it is not OK to stick with the second-choice, to settle for third-best, or to restrict one's own self and one's own choices before one even has the chance to MAKE THE CHOICES!

Make the chances for yourself!
Make the choices for yourself!
You only have one life, as far as we know,
and that life is far too short to drink cheap whiskey!

From The Tominator.