Smile On His Lips and Cuts On His Hips (Jalex)

Twenty Five - Follow Your Bliss

With my obviously very optimistic mindset, I could not imagine myself enjoying going to college. I really simply wished that I could graduate from Dulaney, bail out of Baltimore and never look back, and go and fucking tour the country and play music and meet my idols and be happy. But I was stupidly realistic and stubbornly reigned in my impossible dreams before they could run far enough to even really be qualified as actual aspirations, and knew that that would never happen.

This left me to blankly stare at my black ceiling as the moon barely illuminated its raised ridges, tired eyes refusing to still, unruly mind conjuring up an unobtainable life after high school where I lived somewhere beautiful with infinities of green trees and whistling leaves. A place that proudly exhibited our galaxy’s shining stars that pierce the ink black sky, where I’d barely get by with a shittily paying job that I still loved because I got my lame cash to stack records and laugh with my hilarious coworkers.

I had exactly no thirst to spend another four years of my quickly fleeting by life in a dingy dorm room, going to classes I despised and staying up all night studying, cramming unnecessary information into my pointlessly stressed mind.

My mom sort of did what I'd quietly fantasized of, actually; got into UC Santa Barbara, was put on academic probation after only one semester, dropped out, ran away to Lake Tahoe, spent a couple years working at a ski resort and living, then went back to school and eventually somehow became an accountant working at a depressing retirement home in Maryland. The beginning of that was what I subconsciously longed to do; the latter, exactly what I was terrified of.

I didn’t even really know what I wanted to do with my existence. Maybe I’d finally discovered my reserved interests - vaguely, that is - but I was scared and continuously restrained by my nonexistent confidence in my creations and failure to believe that I could ever actually be good at any of the jobs I cared to do. I was completely and totally petrified that I’d end up at some boring school I hated, trip into a major I despised, and discover myself with a nine to five desk job at the age of fifty, alone and miserable, helplessly trying to figure what had gone wrong with my life as I wasted away the end of my days in an irreversible despair.

Why keep attempting to expand my education if it didn’t contribute any happiness to my life? Why not flee to Germany and become a sticky bartender so I could enjoy the beer and salt sticks that I’d repeatedly heard were so fantastic? Might as freaking well, as I wasn’t talented enough to succeed in the subjects I loved and didn’t conceive that I could possibly stand becoming another office worker who was an unremarkable medium grey.

Even though I’d riddled through all this and was extremely acutely and strongly aware of my clear dearth of interest in attending college, I was going to go to the best school that would take me, because that’s what people did.  I was neither special nor different enough to rebel against the status quo and profitably go away from how society had predetermined that I needed to stumble past my years.

Luckily, though, I had happily decided that I wasn’t nearly motivated enough to fight my way into some Ivy League. No, I’d be perfectly joyful to go through another chunk of my life in some small artsy college where I could learn how to write beautifully and compose riffs that had my ears ecstatically ringing. And that wasn’t even too unachievable of a goal; a nice school in a sweet town that’d let me indulge my devotions and sketch out what I to do next.

Definitely somewhere that didn't require straight A’s to get in; I finished first semester with four A’s and two B’s, getting my lowest grade on my math word problem final (78%) and least impressive overall score in A-PUSH (B-). Good enough, by my admittedly somewhat low standards. I didn’t fail anything, and I would fucking take that.