a new (trite) hope

Hey there, 30-something! I'm sorry your life hasn't turned out the way you planned. That's what you get for letting dumb parents who don't even use the Internet help a 19-year-old figure out "what he wants to do with his life" during the Clinton Administration.

You'd be forgiven for your optimism. After all, we hadn't been subjected to eight years of Bush/Cheney "defend the homeland with infinite detention and torture, and take your shoes off at the airport" jingoism and the rapid fetishization of rich people along with the increasingly exploitiative ways they've pulled up the ladder behind them. If you'd come up to me in high school and said the next president would be a war criminal who would have to be careful which foreign countries he visited, well, I would have laughed. (Then again, the ends of my hair were also bleached at the time. Just the ends. On purpose.)

So, here you are. 19-year-old you is hilariously disappointed in many ways. You have essentially the same job you had while you were in college, except now you're a barista at a corporate coffee shop instead of a local one because you really need the benefits. Your degree in communications is about as unique and useful as a grocery store receipt. You don't own a home, but you have as much debt as a homeowner. Your last relationship ended because you accidentally saw your significant other's Facebook when they forgot to log out, and discovered you were being cheated on. Plus, your friends all think you're a snoop and a Facebook stalker. Your tiny apartment is surrounded on all sides by unemployed insomniac hip-hop mariachi players, and your rent is going up next month. You can't cook, you can't dance, and the angry questioning from your parents about why you haven't gotten a real job or bought a house yet has softened into the hesitant, soft, slightly sad query that comes from someone who already knows what the answer will be, and that they aren't going to like it.

Put down the shotgun, Taylor. There is hope. A new hope.

You can learn to cook tasty food for yourself. You can learn to play an instrument, to paint, to draw. You can learn to dress well and cheaply. You can become knowledgable and confident enough to interrupt strangers in conversation at a bar, and speak confidently about in-season sports; failing that, you can identify former high-school athletes and ask them about their sports, and offer anecdotes to further their personas of lost glory, thus impressing potential mates. You can hold in your mind simultaneously an appreciation for baseball and Broadway. Most of all, you can become a positive, peaceful influence on yourself and those around you. Think of it: the breadth and depth of the crushing disappointment you've felt in the past empowers you to sit in traffic because a squirrel chewed through a traffic signal's power cable and think, "This is not ideal, but it is not as bad as any given moment during those six months I was a telemarketer." The Greeks had a specific kind of love, reserved for misery and tyrants. You can, too.

We are not bound to our misery; we are free to live frugal and interesting lives even though both our paychecks and our bills make us cry. And best of all, I'm here, and I'm gonna help you.