Incompetence - first post on post-college life

Home is a state of mind.  Living in a new place is like a new relationship—it takes getting used to.  You’re excited but you’re not quite comfortable; it takes work to think of it as your own.  When the new place is your first, you have to get every little thing you’ll need (the relationship analogy no longer holds).  Hangers.  Coasters.  A whisk.  You’ll be fine without them, sure, but come the night you need one, and suddenly you’re unsettled at the reminder of how very new this place is.  It’s not college: nothing’s provided.  Home takes development.

            A new setting doesn’t help.  City life—even a “training wheels” city like Boston—to a neophyte like me is tiring.  It’s exhausting how many people there are, living, talking, working, walking, talking, biking, talking. The suburbs of my past had a silent, solipsistic solitude to them—here I’m constantly reminded how freaking busy everyone is all the time.  It’s like a stress mirror.  I’m too new to avert my eyes so I’m constantly looking at everything and everyone and walking faster and faster to avoid theirs and catch up to the city’s pace.

            My apartment is a haven, a little bubble where it’s quiet and still and no one barges unexpectedly through my line of vision.  I’m not worried about anyone overhearing my singing, or at least I’m not worried about judgmental glances.  Coming home is a release from the effort that is self-presentation in the public world.  I strip off the performative aspect of existence and simply am.  Arriving to that asylum at the end of a long day, I get the first inkling that this is home.

            I’m carrying the trophies of my post-grad life: groceries. I clutch the bags in each hand, symbols of my ability to feed myself, both financially and literally.  After the years of being spoiled by dining halls and parents, I reached the “adult” world concerned about cooking.  Yet following recipes and finding time to make them is far easier than expected—aided considerably by Trader Joe’s frozen delights.  It’s shopping that’s proved stressful—I never realized how much time I’d have to spend planning what to buy, going to the store, and returning, lugging with me the hard-won evidence of my competent adulthood.  Only then can I think about actually cooking.

            Tonight, I won’t get to.  For though I stand outside my new apartment with the fruits of my labor, I have lost my most valuable possessions.  There is no feeling of impotence like reaching for your keys and coming up empty-handed.  You stare befuddled as the friendly door that keeps you safe becomes an impassable barrier, a mundane wrist-turn replaced by a night of searching and frustration.  Where my building and apartment keys fell from their ring I’ll never know, but I do know that this is the moment I realize that I love my new apartment.  Only when it is barred to me, with its too-hot water, hard-to-control temperature, more-than-occasional roach cameos and complete and utter lack of cell reception (which I’d laugh off as a first-world problem, were it not for the sobering fact that calling 911 would require exiting the building and courtyard and finding a pocket of signal on the street…which, you know, might not cut it in a situation requiring 911), do I realize how much I yearn for my incomplete set of kitchen chairs and the frozen mac and cheese patiently waiting in my small  freezer.

            It goes without saying that my roommate is out of town. Losing one’s keys must, by law (dammit, Murphy!), come at the most inconvenient time. For example, this summer I chose a day when my then-roommate wasn’t merely out of town but out of state.  In that incident—in a true testament to my college education—I walked out the door sans wallet, phone or keys, leaving myself with literally nothing at my disposal.  Did I mention that I was living in a sub-let and wasn’t on the lease?  At least this time there’s proof I inhabit the apartment I need to enter.  There is little proof that I deserve to.

Anyway, my college-trained mind quickly realizes that I can’t call campus police to let me into my room…I doubt Boston P.D. would react well to a request to “let a man into a locked apartment.”  I feel completely unable to make it in the “real world.”  I mean, it’s not a good sign to be stressed about things that literally every independent human being does: buying food, preparing it, entering and leaving a place of residence...  Fittingly, I can’t even lie down defeated on my bed or console myself with a carton of store-brand ice cream.

            The next afternoon I find myself sitting in an antiseptic testing room, taking the GRE.  (I called my superintendent—like an ADULT—and he more than lived up to his prefix.  Also, yes, I locked myself out the night before a major exam.  Murphy.) To be frank, it’s a stupid test.  Why I need to prove my ability (or lack thereof) to recall math I learned in 10^th grade in order to go to graduate school is beyond me, but I’ve been a scholastic dancing monkey as long as I can remember, and here I sit, tapping along.  The test is long and exhausting and feels more oppressive than any I have taken because I know precisely what percent of my monthly salary it costs.  But it’s just a test.  Weirdly, I’m in my comfort zone, writing persuasive essays for bored TAs and answering questions about passages from obscure textbooks.  It’s college all over again.  Way easier than holding onto my keys.

            I guess sometimes that’s the way these things go.  I literally have the rest of my life to figure out the little necessities of navigating this oh-so-real world.  I knew the new apartment would be a transition, and I knew that a liberal arts education definitely didn’t prepare me for living on my own.  But it does prepare me to write snarky, self-deprecating blog posts on meta-mundanity, so here we are.  Now excuse me, I need to heat up dinner.