Biased but a kernel of truth...?
I'm not sure I agree completely with this, but certainly "regions" as well as the college towns themselves have significant pull on graduates.
AFTER graduating from Brown in May, David Noriega, a 21-year-old comparative literature major from Binghamton, N.Y., moved a few miles away from campus and began reading the books he didn’t have time for in college. While most of his classmates have started jobs in new cities, he is paying cheap rent, playing in a noise band, working on translating two Mexican novels - a voluntary extension of his thesis - and looking for a day job that’s “probably not motivating or career-furthering.”
“The graduation ceremony is this giant, expensive gesture telling you that you are done here,” says Mr. Noriega. “And yet I’m still wandering around the same spaces, passing the desolate main green, wondering what exactly it is that I’m doing.”
PROVIDENCE (pop. 175,255)
(BROWN; RHODE ISLAND SCHOOL OF DESIGN)
Freshly minted graduates support themselves (and their art projects) with part-time jobs like milling soap, making cheese or working as nannies for professors’ children.
They share cavernous spaces in converted 19th-century textile mills in working-class neighborhoods rapidly rising in value, often to the dismay of longtime residents. “Providence used to be a place where graduates left immediately, but now it’s gotten to the point where people not affiliated with either university are moving here just to be near a young, creative community,” says Megan Hall, 26, a public radio reporter who graduated from Brown in 2004 and initially lived in a partially converted potato warehouse, where sacks of potatoes were routinely delivered to the building by forklift. “A lot of us can experiment with this really simple lifestyle. We’re not afraid of being poor.”
Ms. Hall still thinks about returning home to Portland, Ore. Most of her friends, she says, talk about leaving but never do. Last year, she and a friend made a radio documentary, “The Break Up Project Performance,” about the city’s incestuous dating pool, which begins with a teary-voiced woman complaining about all the times she runs into her former boyfriend.
“I go to get my morning coffee, and you’re there,” the woman says, sighing. “I see you in line at the grocery store, at the post office, bookstore, the record shop, on the opposite side of the street. Your friends, your flyers, your stupid [expletive] band. It’s all here, and everywhere, and it feels like I’m suffocating.”
The article makes me consider my own actions post-college that seem to fit at least somewhat into this perspective. We are so linked to our generation and time. What would I have been like just a few decades earlier or later?
Oh and the weekend was fun. Themed boffer practice form alberteqx was appropriately bizarre, challenging, and a good time. The party was likewise entertaining. Though not into the drinking the dancing and conversation were great. Seeing people and celebrating birthdays at Wales was also great! So many people! I must remember to not play that LOTR game...or at least not play it for many hours and then utterly get CRUSHED at the very beginning of the last stage of the game! Stupid sauron! Boffer fighting at night was good too...sad to miss more opportunities during the day, but limited paired engagements with different configurations can be very entertaining.
Today is a lazy day with bitsyboo, which is good.
Be well.
AFTER graduating from Brown in May, David Noriega, a 21-year-old comparative literature major from Binghamton, N.Y., moved a few miles away from campus and began reading the books he didn’t have time for in college. While most of his classmates have started jobs in new cities, he is paying cheap rent, playing in a noise band, working on translating two Mexican novels - a voluntary extension of his thesis - and looking for a day job that’s “probably not motivating or career-furthering.”
“The graduation ceremony is this giant, expensive gesture telling you that you are done here,” says Mr. Noriega. “And yet I’m still wandering around the same spaces, passing the desolate main green, wondering what exactly it is that I’m doing.”
PROVIDENCE (pop. 175,255)
(BROWN; RHODE ISLAND SCHOOL OF DESIGN)
Freshly minted graduates support themselves (and their art projects) with part-time jobs like milling soap, making cheese or working as nannies for professors’ children.
They share cavernous spaces in converted 19th-century textile mills in working-class neighborhoods rapidly rising in value, often to the dismay of longtime residents. “Providence used to be a place where graduates left immediately, but now it’s gotten to the point where people not affiliated with either university are moving here just to be near a young, creative community,” says Megan Hall, 26, a public radio reporter who graduated from Brown in 2004 and initially lived in a partially converted potato warehouse, where sacks of potatoes were routinely delivered to the building by forklift. “A lot of us can experiment with this really simple lifestyle. We’re not afraid of being poor.”
Ms. Hall still thinks about returning home to Portland, Ore. Most of her friends, she says, talk about leaving but never do. Last year, she and a friend made a radio documentary, “The Break Up Project Performance,” about the city’s incestuous dating pool, which begins with a teary-voiced woman complaining about all the times she runs into her former boyfriend.
“I go to get my morning coffee, and you’re there,” the woman says, sighing. “I see you in line at the grocery store, at the post office, bookstore, the record shop, on the opposite side of the street. Your friends, your flyers, your stupid [expletive] band. It’s all here, and everywhere, and it feels like I’m suffocating.”
The article makes me consider my own actions post-college that seem to fit at least somewhat into this perspective. We are so linked to our generation and time. What would I have been like just a few decades earlier or later?
Oh and the weekend was fun. Themed boffer practice form alberteqx was appropriately bizarre, challenging, and a good time. The party was likewise entertaining. Though not into the drinking the dancing and conversation were great. Seeing people and celebrating birthdays at Wales was also great! So many people! I must remember to not play that LOTR game...or at least not play it for many hours and then utterly get CRUSHED at the very beginning of the last stage of the game! Stupid sauron! Boffer fighting at night was good too...sad to miss more opportunities during the day, but limited paired engagements with different configurations can be very entertaining.
Today is a lazy day with bitsyboo, which is good.
Be well.