This past weekend I was lucky enough to drive to Plainville, Connecticut near Hartford, to visit a college friend stopping in Beacon, NY in the Hudson Valley to pick up a second college friend on the way. Being that we all graduated from Ithaca College and spent a 4-5 years of our life in the eco-friendly, liberal, hippy town, we accordingly found ourselves talking about recycling, good coffee, Pink Floyd concerts, and the end of the world as we know it because of the financial crisis and depletion of our planet.
Also, being that we all graduated from Ithaca College and have recently entered real life, I myself in the form of a full-time job at the Bank of New York Mellon, Emily in the form of 3 part-time jobs including keeping the books at Michael's Crafts Store (who come to find out does not recycle paper) and Shelby, attending grad school at Hart University for music education and working part-time at America Eagle, we did wind up talking about the state of financial crisis that we are all in personally. Our individual piles of debt, mine equivalent to a good size mortgage, have us wondering how we are to get by for the next 20-25 years. While we are all busy making ends meet it was nice to have this chance to get together and see each other which we can't do regularly because of the distance between us. While we sat around drinking red wine the conversation eventually turned to our one year plan in the event the world were to end in December 2012 as per the Mayan Calendar end of the world theory. It went something like, "I wish I knew definitively because I would stop paying my loans and quit my job and just have a ball."
On the same note I brought up that I'd been looking for ways to make more money to pay off my loans. Like how the National Guard will pay you a 10,000 dollar sign-on bonus and practically pay all of your school loans. All you need to do in return is go to basic training (something I would find as fun as challenging anyway) and put in one weekend a month and two weeks a year. Besides the fact that you could be called to active duty at any point in a state of emergency, which is really the only unappealing part as I don't think I'd last very long in the Middle East. Then we got on the topic of war to which I said maybe if the government didn't spend so much money preparing for the worst (aka paying the National Guard so much money, with many people like myself who consider joining just for the money and lack of options) we could disperse that money and we would have less financial crisis, less misery and malcontent and therefore less violence or war, to which Shelby said, "So, communism." "...Right" I said actually thinking about what I said and then admitting I'm OK with being just a little bit commi, even though I graduated from a Business School, twice. Though I mean no disrespect especially being so near Veterans's day. Our soldiers deserve all the honor in the world, I'd just be happy to have less of them, and less of them losing their lives.
On the way home dropping off Em, we resumed our conversation. Our generation I think is more aware or sensitive to some of the problems in the world than previous generations because they didn't have to think about overpopulation or depletion of our planet when they were growing up. Everything was about growing bigger and prosperity but now we are seeing some of the negative effects of this. I told Em it will take time and natural disasters for more people to wrap their heads around technology and the pace of which we live catching up with us. (I hate how the world is crazy working so much just for the simple fact that we now can. Who's with me for starting a commune and growing our own food?)
Now on this ride home the sun was shining and it was as beautiful a November day in the Northeast as one could hope for so I thought maybe we were getting a little too heavy sitting in silence lost in thought after my last comment. The resolution I came up with for all of this is to leverage my small but meaningful ability to do my part to contribute to the greater good by writing and sharing and to keep myself from falling into hopeless thought and clouding the collective conscious. I decided instead to think about what I would get my boyfriend for his birthday on December 3rd. As the sun shined I settled on the fact that we would all do well to do our part and simply be grateful for the little things which turn out to be the biggest joys in life. Just like small trips to see friends on beautiful weekends.
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