.lipstick on everything.

      "There are many writers and anthropologists and historians who have lived with little money and great ardor because they craved interestingness first and stability second. But few have lived pathetically. Few have woken up each morning to pursue that which is boring, that which is disastrously uninteresting, that which is done to grind together the gears of industry with little eventual satisfaction outside of a paycheck." (Cody Delistraty, "Why We Need Humanities Majors").

      I just read a handy article in the Thought Catalog about why humanities majors are meaningful in the world. With holidays looming, I like many graduates and students of art, history, literature, language, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, etc., stand to be bombarded with questions about what I plan to do with my life, and why I chose to major in studio art, and how long I intend to toil about in the office support world before moving on to graduate school or whatever is next. 

      The irony here is that my family is up to its eyeballs in humanities professors. I am lucky enough to have been given a lot of support regarding my academic decisions - no one tried to talk me into something more practical, or more lucrative. No one has suggested that I teach. 

      But even so, the questions keep on coming. And new questions are born just about every time I meet any new person. Of course, I have a few canned answers - the always snarky, "I'm going to be an artist," or the more defensible, "I'd like to work for a non-profit arts organization like the Urban Art Commission here in Memphis." The truth, though, is that I just don't know. The truth is that the end-game had absolutely nothing to do with the choice to study art, or to go to Rhodes, or even to apply to colleges in the first place. 

      Delistraty's article piqued my interest where he says, "There is a rather depressing, albeit growing belief that college is “about the degree” — the same excuse that justifies skipping class or exerting only a minimum effort on assignments and exams, where students do just enough to get the grade, but little more." I don't totally disagree, but my experience does point to the contrary. 

      Here, Delistraty seems to be arguing that college as simply one's ticket to landing a good job is, as a cultural idea, somehow replacing a previous belief that college is about learning and growing and all of that humanitarian bullshit. He is right to call this shift depressing, but I hardly think we need to brace ourselves for a cultural apocalypse.

      Anywhere you look, you will find college graduates as unemployed and unprepared for the "real world" as the four-year-olds they are scrambling to nanny for. You will also find people with minimal or no post-secondary education doing pretty well for themselves. I think people - and particularly young people - are just beginning to understand that a college degree doesn't amount to a hill of beans, as my Gran says, unless you can figure out how to leverage it properly.

      For my parents and grandparents, obtaining a degree (or not) did make a substantial difference in their career opportunities. Their experiences and the culture of education they created in my family made it a foregone conclusion that my brother and I would, at the very least, go to college. Even the idea of a gap year never crossed my mind until I got rejected from my first choice university. 

      I also won't pretend that my degree, even just in being on my resume, didn't help me get the job I have now. But even when I was declaring my major three years ago, or certainly when I was applying to colleges six years ago, I wasn't thinking about the long term. I was thinking about what was interesting. I grew up in a big (little) college town, so I thought the inverse would be appealing - a little college in a big(ish) city. I would cross the other bridges as I found them.

      Even now, I will be the first to say that the benefits of going to college are largely social. I've probably forgotten half of what I learned, and I've certainly retained more abstract skills than concrete ones, but I will die knowing exactly where to get an expertly-soundtracked plate of piping hot chicken fingers at 3:00 in the morning. I'll remember who was singing "I Wanna Dance With Somebody" in the stairwell when I first met him before I think of Whitney Houston singing it well. I'll laugh at the memory of what my flatmate yelled from her room when she finished The Count of Monte Cristo before I remember who wrote it, or what I thought of it when I reached the end of the last page.

      That said, one of the most exciting things about my college experience was the sense of competition; being challenged intellectually and challenging myself to do much more than I was required to do. I never felt like I was in the world Delistraty describes, where disinterested people muddle through assignments and scrape by, doing just enough and expecting a big shiny job offer at the end.

      Of course, it was tough a lot of the time. We did not sleep very much, and we did a lot of work that we did not enjoy, but I very rarely lost sight of my own basic passion or that of my peers. I knew I wasn't on my way to a six-figure salary, but I never thought about it. We were told from day one - there's sleep, there's school, and there's a social life. Pick two. We'll see you at graduation. 

      My makeup table in disarray and Rimmel's Moisture Renew Lipstick in 550 Back To The Fuchsia. I've been loving this sort of bright, blue-toned pink for summer and just picked this one up today when I stopped in to use the drug store as an ATM between work and dinner with friends.

      Remember that time when regret started to settle in while you were actively doing something you would instantly regret? I am sitting at Republic Coffee in a puddle of that moment, latte in hand, headphones on head, hoping the conversation I’ve chosen to overhear instead of listening to music will offer me some confirmation that other people are also stupid.

      For the record, I recognize that tonight’s events have been but a minor social hiccup, and I ask that you excuse the melodramatic flourish. I don’t embarrass myself very often (which is not to say I don’t do embarrassing things very often). When I do, it sends me on a brief but occasionally productive spiral of self-doubt.

      The setting? Walgreens. 9:00pm. Enter, Lizz, the young-and-perpetually-exhausted administrative support specialist in search of a retractable kabuki brush and a last-minute birthday card. She exchanges a polite hello with an extraordinarily tall stranger as she thumbs through the spectrum of Covergirl’s Lip Perfection Jumbo Gloss Balms, eventually selecting two (3) to add to her collection.

      The stranger is handsome. Not devastatingly so, but handsome enough to note. I suppose the average person registers a thought similar to “that person is reasonably attractive,” at least a dozen times every day as long as they leave their house. Reasonably attractive people are everywhere. They have to be at work at the same time as you every morning; they ride around in cars; they buy groceries; they walk their dogs. They exchange polite hellos with you at Walgreens as you try not to drop the armful of small items you didn’t intend to buy.

      So you can imagine my surprise when this reasonably attractive stranger asked me to go out with him as we fumbled about with our keys in the parking lot, our cars parked right across from one another.

      In case you’re thinking “Stranger danger! Forget your keys, woman! Get your pepper spray!” allow me to clarify. It was fine. Stranger appeared to have all of his original teeth. He was probably a few years older than me, but still comfortably in his twenties. He didn’t stare or wolf-whistle. He didn’t even walk toward me when he started to speak.

      In fact, the only alarming thing about him was his confidence. It caught me off guard, and I handled it with the composure of a distressed ostrich.

      While my head was in the ground, I managed to ignore the well-meaning charm, the handsome face, the refreshing directness, and the complete novelty of a potential date with someone I don’t already know. Out came the flood of rehearsed responses I keep underneath my tongue for the uglies. Stranger was visibly disappointed; I was a giant flightless bird with bonky knees.

      I got in my car and drove away, half hoping Stranger would turn up here, at Republic, where I could redeem myself or at least apologize; the other half very glad to know there is almost no chance I will run into this person again.

      Of course, the moral of this story is that I wish I had agreed to go out, or exchanged numbers, or something other than what I did. I could have just rejected someone really great. I could have made a new friend, or started a grand adventure. He could become rich and famous. At worst, I could have had a nightmarish first date – the first of hopefully not very many such dates in my life. All possibilities considerably better than the unadventurous nothing I will be doing instead.

      It was Schrödinger’s first date, except that I decided to never open the bunker. That poor cat is forever suspended in a superposition because of my terrible ostriching and now it’ll have to starve to death, even if the bomb didn’t go off (watch this).