It's Just a Year

This has become the mantra of Gen Y. It's just a year, it's just a year, it’s just a year. As we map and re map the path of our life, we dip our feet into different jobs and places and experiences, crossing off the bad and starring the good. But the uncertainty of how you will handle a new experience can make the task of stepping into a new pool of responsibility unnerving yet necessary. And there are the entry-level tasks and "resume building" keys we all need to have to open doors down the line. Doors that you don't even know address to yet. But you don’t want to miss any of the necessary grunt work that might lead to your American (or International) Dream. So you bite the bullet. For a year.

It’s all I can say when talking to my friends about their I-don’t-get-no-satisfaction entry level jobs and when they get pink eye for the third time from their students. It’s just a year. Then something else, something better. Grin and bare it and make friends with the local bartender and you will survive. If you have something that you want in your future bad enough, I think patient is a virtue. Kate has been talk and dreaming about moving to Europe for a while now. She talked to her boss and they are situating her in the company in a place that could really make that come true. But before she jets off to Italy, she has to work in the agency’s corporate headquarters, a culture far different from the small boutique agency branch she loves and works in now. But it’s just a year. A year in the conservative ivory tower of corporate life that could lead to her dream job working in an international advertising agency, painting the Paris skyline from a bridge across the Seine, and having passionate and forbidden love affairs with tall, dark, and handsome European soccer players. It’s just a year.

Laura has the same relationship with teaching that I have with accounting. Don’t love it, sometimes hate it, but not ready to throw that bachelor’s degree in the trash just yet. She suffered through one year of student teaching and three bouts of pink eye, because, even though she was uninspired by her years of education courses, because she knows she needs to be a real teacher for at least one year, with her own classroom and her own kids and her own rules for one year, before really thinking about throwing in the towel. It's just a year. Then she can reevaluate where she is and where she wants to be.

Even where we live in our 20's is a hop scotch game from city to city, trying out all different lifestyles before making a commitment to settle down somewhere. Big city, small town, East Coast, West Coast, US or abroad. The possibilities are endless. For as long as I can remember I have known that I wanted to live in a big city. And I'm here and I love it. Living the dream now is making room for another dream to reach for once I've soaked up enough of the city to satisfy. I still take comfort in the fact that the only thing tying me down is my apartment lease.

They call this time in a Gen Yers life the "quarter-life crisis". Where the proverbial midlife crisis is based on regrets of paths not taken in the past, the quarter-life crisis is stress over having too many options and paths to take and fear of taking the wrong path or missing one that could lead to a fulfilled and happy life. I don't think anyone in our position is whining about how many choices we have, but the choices we face are decided by our character, who we are and who we will become. Too bad not enough of us have been out of the structure of academia to really know who we are or who we will become. I think part of the fuel behind the quarter-life crisis, a relatively newly coined phrase in 2001, is the commonality of the term midlife crisis. We've been hearing that term and the negative emotions surrounding it, our whole life (the term was first published in 1965). Instead of accepting our fate of regret when we are 50 years old, we are trying our hardest to leave no regrets in our past, to take every challenge we can, not to miss any passing opportunities, to do what we love every day. But its tough to do what we love every day when we don't know what that is yet. So we want to try it all, we don't want to miss a chance to catch our dreams and live what we love every day. It's just a year, a year closer to that dream.

Every man wants to be part of a heist

A wise man once said "There are a few things men want more than sex. Every man wants to be part of a heist." That wise man was Dane Cook.

I always though that parents blaming the media and video games for corrupting their children was a load of psych crap finger-pointing (not directed at you Erin). Take responsibility for your children. And get your pets spayed or neutered. But four college kids from Kentucky are behind bars for basing an artifact heist on tricks of the trade they saw in classic 21st century heist movies like the Oceans and Snatch. My opinion was counteracted. 4 friends blind sided a librarian at the University of Kentucky library and attempted to steal something like $12 million worth of 1st edition breakthrough science textbooks that included Darwin's The Origin of Species. John Falk turned Vanity Fair into a literary Bourne Ultimatum with his article "Majoring in Crime" (The Vanity Fair print was not posted on the website. This is a summary of the feature from the local paper where the heist took place.) He went to the prison where the guys are serving their 7 year sentences. Since the law has already caught up with them, there was no reason to hold back on the plan.

The article goes into detail about how the idea came about (a smoke down in a dorm room), how they planned it (talks with "our guy", watching Snatch, Oceans 11/12/13, Reservoir dogs, jetting over to NYC and Amsterdam to plan the black market sale of the books with characters worthy of villain parts in the next Italian Job), how they tried to execute it the first time (failed because their timing interfered with one of the guys final exams.), how it finally went down (taser the old librarian and stuff as many books as possible into a bedsheet), the loop hole (they didn't know where the emergency exit was), the chase (four 20 year olds vs four librarians and an escape van borrowed from someones mom), and the escape (in time for one dudes tennis final exam). The suspenseful part was post-capture. The guys had to travel to NYC to get the books appraised at Christie's (the black market buyer would only accept the books with a proper appraisal of the value) but the clock was ticking because within a week the news of the stolen books would be public and they would be caught with their hand in the cookie jar if they waltzed into the famous auction house with the books. They made it to NYC but the appraiser hesitated to give them the value because of their age (20 years old) manor (20 years old) and lack of knowledge of the history of the books. The plan came to a halt as they waited to hear back from Christie's. Within that time, investigators in Kentucky pieced together the crime. The guys knew the plan had come unraveled and in the following weeks they went about their business as usual and waited for their arrests, which came shortly after. Gen Y 0 Librarians 1

Sounds like a cop out ending at first, but the articles ends with the big question "WHY?" The guys explained that they basically had nothing to lose. College wasn't for them. Their small town didn't fit them. They didn't want to end up pigeonholed in a dead end job in a dead end city. They wanted more. So when they plans were coming together for the heist, they had to ask "what if?" What if they got away with it? They would each have millions to their name. They would flee the country and live in the Mediterranean with yachts and women and booze, like another James Bond or Max Burdett. And what if they get caught? They go to jail for a few years, and after they come out, they will be forced to start over. They will have to move out of the small town to preserve their dignity and start fresh, start over. Win win.

To imagine the lengths these people went through to rid themselves of their past, to move forward and create a better life for themselves, one they believe they deserve, seemed so out of touch with reality. But the big picture of that, that giant risky move to get what you want out of life, happens every day. Especially to Gen Yer that are now being forced out of school and into real life, force to decide what to make of their life. I made the jump a few months back when I decided to uproot from Cleveland and try out a taste of this big city life (which is working out pretty damn well) I guess we all have our own ways of finding what fits for us. To each his own.