Happy Hour

Tonight’s Drink: Mondavi Merlot.

They say that the fall from the top is the hardest, but I don’t think physics always translates cleanly into the metaphorical world. I say that the fall from almost-the-top is way harder – the crush of frustration can feel like enough to kill, sometimes.

In college, we learned about a phenomenon where the better a nation’s quality of life gets, the more dangerous it is for it to fall. The highest standard, presumably, gives you some cushion to recover, though. Think about a 4% drop in employment in the US as compared to a smaller, less developed country. There’s more wiggle room at the way, way top, but the hump before it seems to bump up against a glass ceiling all its own. Of course, if the giant topples, though, you’ve got some serious problems to deal with. Whether or not the fall of an empire is inevitable is another blog post all its own. 

It’s as if a higher standard brings with it less room for mistakes – like a higher level in a video game gets more challenging, and tries harder to kill your character. So where is the incentive to make life better, then? You grow, you make friends, you make enemies, you get your hearbroken, you get your dreams stepped on, you learn from your mistakes and pay for your good intentions. All in the name of the ends justifying the means. That someday, it will all pay off, and you’ll be happy. If you don’t topple.

My dad went through the garage a few weeks ago and happened across some of my yearbooks, school awards, trophies, etc. He paid a lot of money to ship them to me, along with a beloved sweater from something like eight years ago.

I went through everything last night, after a sickly 12 hours of sleep. I wiped the dust off the pictures, read the pre-summer musings of past classmates, looked at my face and my friends through the year, and all the things I had and hadn’t done. I made two piles in my living room: trash and keep. In the end, the only thing I kept was the sweater. I put it on and fell back asleep.

It’s amazing how important those things were to me, and the length of time I revered them for. But, turning the pages, shifting through the certificates, none of it meant anything to me last night. I had my memories that I wanted to keep – the rest of it, I never wanted to see again.

This seems a little contradictory to my excitement for our impending class reunion, but I had a great time catching up with old classmates at Chelsea’s wedding, and I can’t wait to do it on a grander scale with whoever actually shows up. It wasn’t the people or the education or the place that I can’t stand to think about now – it was that time, it was my head.

So I wonder, now, if my head is on straight. I make a concerted effort to clear out my clutter on a regular basis, and I’m looking forward to throwing out a bunch of stuff in these next couple of weeks when I move to my new place. But does it say something that I’m shying away from keeping things that should mean something to me?