Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Summer.doc

I was just going through my computer, cleaning up my desktop, organizing some files, ya know, avoiding homework, and I found this.  I remember writing it last summer.  It started as a (slightly inebriated) stream-of-consciousness, and turned into the thing I worry about once every few months.  It also appears that I gave up and went back to bed when I reached the point where I’d really have to figure out what I was talking about.  It seems appropriate that I found it tonight because I’ve been having that old, familiar tingle of self-loathing that usually comes from the fact that I don’t have a clue about what I’m going to do with my life.  It would be great if I even had an idea about what I *want* to do with it, at least that would be something. Also, sorry for the buzzkill.  

TL;DR  - Found this.  It’s a bummer.  I sort of suck.

***

He lay there, awake in bed.  She was already sleeping, and it was not unusual that she fell asleep before him.  Falling asleep was always a challenge for him, he just wished that sleeping next to her would change that.  Not to say that there was anything remotely wrong with her, rather that she was the one shining light in his life. 
    The rest of it was a mess, especially if you asked him.  There he was, at the summer before his senior year of college, his whole life ahead of him.  This is what everything up until this point in his life was supposed to be preparing him for, right?  Elementary school prepared us for high school which prepared us for college.  College was supposed to prepare us for real life.  His problem is that he still felt like a child, a twenty-one year old boy.  That’s what he was.  All around him in class he saw the future leaders of the world.  Goldman Sachs.  Deliotte.  KPMG. Booz-Allen.  His classmates aspired to run hedge funds and  have nice, big houses in nice, gated communities.  His classmates could answer any question posed in class, while he struggled to get by.  This isn’t an underdog story though.  He could answer the questions, if only he’d put in the time.  He didn’t put in the time because he didn’t care.  Not about those questions.  “If a certain asset has possible cashflows x,y, and z in the future…”  He could figure out the value of your asset, real or financial.  He knew how to discount future cash flows, use DCF valuation, or use comps to value a company or figure out its stock price. 
    He could do this because he was a finance major.  He entered college as an engineer, but after realizing engineering entailed mostly writing code to optimize something, he got out.  So he joined the business school, because everyone knows you’ll never own a yacht if you have a liberal arts education.  Freshman year went pretty smoothly, him knocking out university and college requirements and making new friends.  He played Halo. He stayed in the dorms.  He drank 40’s at four on football Fridays.  He helped friends sneak girls in. 
    She broke up with him.  Too many new friends, too few phone calls.  The road got a little rough.  He hung around the bottom of bottles most of the time.  Sometimes he’d call her and make it worse by saying he’d be better.  He felt sorry for himself and numbed the pain.  Killed the pain most of the time.  It wasn’t so bad.  He managed to keep it together in school for the most part.  He spent the summer dealing with new issues with mom and dad.  The college kid came home and had to deal with rules again.  The rules didn’t go over that great , but they all got by.  He worked construction on the pipeline with real men.  It was a whirlwind of a summer.  Pipeline by day, party by night.  Get up and do it all over again.  Sophomore year wasn’t much different.  Good friends became great friends, and yeah, he got a lot closer to the people too.  The business school told him to pick a major, so he went with finance because the really smart kids said that it was the best one.  So, he went through the motions.  He got a fake ID.  He smoked cigarettes and played pool until four in the morning at Club 23.  He saw jersey chasers catch up to football players at CJ’s.  He blacked out at Fever.  He drank mostly because it was fun, and hey what else was there to do?  Cut to another summer of beer and life on the pipeline that fades right into junior year.  He moved off campus so he didn’t have to break the way too strict rules of the dorm that put such a damper on all the fun.  He lived in the apartment that looked and smelled more like a bar. School started slipping.  The reasons he was there became less clear to him. 

No comments: