Generation WTF

Hello!

I'm a resident of Baton Rouge, in the swampy state of Louisiana, which is still operating partly under the Napoleonic Code. In May, I completed my BA in English with a concentration in Creative Writing and a minor in History.

I woke up today and I realized that July is here, and I am still waiting tables. Something feels wrong. I had big dreams! I wanted to travel the world and revolutionize the print industry, write bestsellers with little effort, and give commencement speeches and whatnot. Instead, I'm refilling iced tea with specified amounts of ice and serving dressing on the side.

What's more depressing is that many of my friends from my graduating class are in the same boat: scanning through Craigslist scams and hoping for the best.

Now, it very well could be that my major is composed of lazy, pretentious faux-writers, and the ones who aren't, aren't my friends. It's definitely within the realm of possibilities. Yet, I've known these people for six years now, and the lot of them aren't lazy. In fact, there's a high level of talent in the Creative Writing program at LSU.

I'd like to talk about my generation a little bit, comparatively.

The baby boomers were cautious Spock children who quickly learned the order of things after the 1960s: without much protest, most of them cut their hair, stopped dropping out and started blending in. I suppose the large-scale disruptions of the 60s allowed many of these delinquents to get all the unrest out of their systems in one decade. How lucky they were.

Their children composed Generation X--the question mark of an equation that hadn't yet been composed--were expected to be the laziest of the lazy. Their Spock-raised, ex-hippy parents had decided that Spock was a damaging approach to parenting, and they noticed their kids listening to music that seemed to have no soul or cause. What interests me about Gen-X is that they grew up in a time without a cause. No clear social injustice, no world war. A little touch of recession here and there, but nothing major that would influence an American teenager. Those kids went to college and lots of them caught the dot-com wave, buying up domain names and learning HTML and programming languages. This generation had the perfect storm of technological advancements and solid parenting, and if one had a degree in Computer Science, they were a shoe-in for a high-paying job right out of college, regardless of if they caught the dot-com bubble while it was growing.

The wildly successful of Gen-X didn't have to cut their hair, yet so many of them did when it came time to sell their websites to huge corporations. I imagine it was quite a shock to their parents to see their children making bank with a machine filled with zeroes and ones, that was only beginning to advance at the time of their birth. The rift between ex-hippies and Gen-X gets bigger every year. The values held by the Age of Aquarius aren't relevant anymore, it seems. America never has been a country for old men. Spock's cold shoulder still chills my grandmother, to the point where she and I cannot relate, on any level. I suppose I can't expect her to; she braved a World War and the biggest economic downturn the United States had ever seen. It's given her an undiminishing optimism that totally escapes me. It's easy to understand though--she's been through it all, and it was so much worse. At least they had the Cleaver family to look up to.

And that leaves us: Generation WTF.

As I hold my shiny new English degree, I wonder where our generation's Cleaver family is. Can they be found in the Osbournes? On Newlyweds? In a brave new world of mixed signals, we have no shining, solid example. It took me six years to figure out that I wanted an English degree, and it happened as I was walking across the stage at LSU's PMAC. Now the student loan bills are coming in, and I'm still waiting tables (which, by the way, destroys even the most holy of souls). Why did it take me so long to decide? Am I lazy?

These are my skills: I can manage money, I can write a short story, I can chain smoke, I can BS a paper that fooled my Harvard-taught, Medieval specialist Chaucer professor. I can make a deadline, I can sort of speak German, and I can beat anyone at Solitaire. Even though my loan bills amount to $22,131.70, I may as well have spent six years banging my head against some bricks. I have no idea what I'm going to do.

However, I do know what I don't want to do: Sit in cubicle. Watch the clock. Anything involving more than simple math is out of the question. Eight to five. Early nights and/or mornings. Teaching--those kids are getting smarter and more stupid by the hour.

And my parents--thank God they didn't foot my college bills--do all of those things, every day. At first glance I'd point at laziness. I wish it were that simple.

I'm not lazy. I work my ass off, and I still find time to write, clean, grocery shop, mop, and do laundry at the ghetto laundromat on Government Street. I even clean my A.C. filter once a month.

I meet up with my college friends often--some of them wait tables with me--and none of us can find a nice, parent-approved job with our fancy English degrees. We're still writing, but no one is publishing.

What has happened? The dot-com bubble has burst, and I only know qBasic and a little VB, if that ever mattered. There are no more frontiers to front in that area. For some reason, I always thought I'd become an AP journalist, but the print news industry has one foot in the glue factory. The internet is lovely, and I've been addicted to it since seventh grade, but every ad I've answered on Craigslist is a scam--even the ones I didn't want to apply to.

I am one of thousands, millions of a BA-holding generation who was told to go to college; and that's all. In a recession, the jobs are down, pressure is up, and our parents are perpetually disappointed in their crotchfruit because a degree actually meant something in the 60s. A degree means nothing in a jobless job market. There was the Great Depression--before national schism was ever thought of, then the great counter culture of the 60s and 70s, followed by Google and eBay and Yahoo. We're the follow-ups. WTF.

Our first instinct is to blame someone, but there's no one to blame. Even if we could blame the dot-com entrepreneurs, what are we going to do? Sue them? For writing the paths to their own success? Hardly.

All blames and politics set aside, these are our times, fellow Gen-WTFuckers. This is what we've been given. We're used to being given things, but we've graduated college in the middle of an economic nervous breakdown. We can't reinvent Google, and although the urge is great, we can't sign up for welfare. We're educated; let's not forget that. We're not satisfied with the cubicles of our parents, or our cousins' search engines. We have to invent a whole new flavor of Kool-aid and stop waiting around for someone to pay us to keep making that gross yellow kind.

We're not different, we're not special. No one's going to call us that right out of college, no matter how much it cost us. I'm not being idealistic here, but we can be different and special. We just have to get off our asses and start thinking first. Maybe we haven't because no one told us we'd have to figure this out after college. It's a horrible excuse.

That's why I'm here. I'm finished with waiting for someone to hire me to perform a job that I'll hate every day of my life. And I hope you're reading this because you're finished with it too.