all is optional

“Edit this story down so we can put it in the magazine,” Tyler said, flinging ten pages at me when I arrived at a busy Press office early Friday afternoon.

“I’ll help you,” C.J. offered.

An hour later, we were off to eat burritos and cut unnecessary details of an American boy’s wanderlust.

Watching bad pirate movies sets the tone for him to be my life coach (as he later dubbed himself) for the next three hours. Thanks, buddy. No sarcasm.

“I don’t know” and shrugging your shoulders are not acceptable answers. His words were hardly violent but they felt like bombs raining down on my head (and, I had no rain coat). I could’ve disappeared into those ugly, red, plastic booths but we were not in the Lower East Side so, I didn’t.

Before I knew it, there were crocodile tears in my eyes. He asked why I was crying but I had no words. How do you explain that you’ve become what you were making an active effort to avoid?

Pursuit of happiness: a tiny Himalayan nation just made it a political goal. So, why is it that I’m running in a diametrically opposite direction or am I? I’m not entirely unhappy; in fact, most days, I think I’m quite happy.

“$99 roundtrip to the Bahamas and $99 for three nights and four days. JetBlue is begging you to go,” he exclaimed. It is imperative for me to succeed as a person, as a writer.

And, maybe, he’s right. It’s time to start thinking about the future.

I jumped out of an aeroplane for a reason, to promise myself that this is twentieth year of life would not be the same stagnant puddle of potential sewage that others have described theirs as. But that’s precisely what I’ve done this term: cared far too much for things that I only care about casually and nothing of what I care about passionately (writing).

“It’s easier to care more about casual things,” I said, sinking further into my seat, when he asked if the paper would die if I weren’t around and whether or not I cared if it did.

It’s a terrible thing to be terrified of your own life, your own future.

“Hello, everyone, I’m trying to sell some grapes to raise money for my basketball team,” said a man holding a box of grapes on the F train that ushered Cat and I away from the latest Woody Allen film (Matchpoint).

Tick, tock, keep an eye on the clock: MTA and TWU negotiations might bring the train to a screeching halt in the middle of the station.

I gave the guy a band-aid I was saving for my right index finger and he gave us a grape each.

Later that night, as we stomped through the puddles, cold rain at our backs, through the East Village, Katy said, “I don’t like God… or vegetable oil” in response to the Grace Church on East 10th Street and the girl who declared Christianity and theatre as her two loves in her contributor’s biography for our University’s literary magazine Aphros.

And, I wondered if I wore atheism on my sleeve and bombarded people with it upon first glance and why atheists never had a beauteous temple to discuss their thoughts. Maybe, because there are too many different kids of us and we are far too busy judging one another to come together. To quote Dana Taplin, a poet and professor of environmental studies, “Sigh for America’s revolutionary generation.” Nevermind the fact that he was referring to the late breaking student anti-war movement of the 1960s and ’70s, we are no better now. In fact, we’re probably far worse.