Everytings Irie, Mon

I returned home yesterday from a week spent in the Caribbean sun-burnt, tired and a little hung over, but the remnants of my last Spring Break could not rival the pit in my stomach that had accompanied me to Jamaica.

The source of anxiety was the future, of course, and how barren mine appears. Before losing my shirt and donning flip-flops and board shorts for the week, I had a job interview that I presumed had gone well. After dropping my bag to the floor and proving to my mother I had returned with all my limbs, I fired up my bored laptop hoping to find a job offer, but instead, merely disappointment.

I love Ryan Howard, but I never hoped to mimic his pension for swinging and missing. The sting from another rejection letter lingered well into the night, a companion with a whiny, unceasing and pessimistic voice that brought me crashing back to earth off my high from Negril.

“See how much trouble you’re in?” the voice would whisper in my ear. “Graduation is only two months away, your friends will be off to contribute to society, and all your frivolous time in college will finally bite you in the ass.”

“What will you do? Where will you go? How will you survive?” All questions that swirled through my head and tormented my night until dawn brought the distraction of a day at my internship. As I stepped out of the shower, loaded up my toothbrush and looked into the mirror, a smile crawled across my face. I smiled because I had spent the last week in a third world country, a country filled with desperate men and women who depended on my peers for their yearly sustenance and to plug the holes in their tin roofs. I smiled because while it stings to be told no, I only heard you can’t from that dastardly devil in my head.

Many will be forced to scrap and scrape harder than I, and many more have been told no while their fridges lay barren and the lights flicker at night. I still have two more months in the cushy cocoon of college, and fretting them away will not get me employed. But I shall Press On, with persistence and determination, while enjoying the setting sun of my college career.