The BSF

In childhood, we all had our monsters. Some were hairy and lived in closets; others were multi-fanged and slept under a bed. We were told as kids that if we ignored them, the monsters would go away, back to whatever tortured chamber of our subconscious they had come from. What grown-ups didn’t tell us was that as we got older, those scary (but at least nighttime-bound) creatures would be replaced by worse ones, specters that would haunt our late teenage-early twenties years day and night, whether we were asleep or awake.

They never warned us about the BSF.

Now, as we enter adulthood, so many of my peers and I are plagued by questions of the future. We were led to believe that if we were polite to grown-ups, followed the rules, worked hard instead of watching TV, and brought home good grades, these questions would practically answer themselves. But I’ve found that the questions of what am I going to do and who will be there with me while I do it can strike at any time…

…And without so much as a blink transform themselves into uncontrollable, drooling monsters the likes of which I have never had to face before. The future has become the BIG SCARY FUTURE.

The BSF. The haunter of any college grad’s nightmares.

You can recognize the BSF by its two heads, the Drooling Head of Love and Marriage and the Sharp-Beaked Head of Career (also known as the What-The-#$%&-Are-You-Doing-With-Your-Life Head).

The scariest part about the BSF is that is cannot be fought off. If you ignore it, you risk turning into a character to be played by Seth Rogen (also starring a 40-year-old Michael Cera). Eventually, you must face this monster with every weapon you’ve acquired over the years. The problem with this is that you have little-to-no way of knowing which weapons will be effective, or if the only way past the BSF is sheer, dumb luck.

In facing the Love/Marriage Head (recognizable by its distinctive gold ring and constant drooling), I’ve gotten every form of advice from “attend more parties” to “grow your hair” to “wear more/less makeup” to “don’t think about it and it will drop into your lap.” So far, the monster keeps roaring in my face, and its breath stinks. So far, I’ve watched many of my friends tame it with varying levels of effort, from “bat my eyelashes and I’m taken” to “this is my sixteenth Shidduch date and at least he’s tolerable.”

As for the Career Head (with its sharp features and under-eye bags), I’m armed with a little more: a few part-time jobs, an internship or two, references from kind people, and a shiny new college degree. However, it seems that the monster has built up a resistance to this type of weaponry, considering that every knight it faces nowadays is armed with exactly the same things, especially in a city like New York.

Blech.

Our battle with the BSF can wage for months, even years, and between our weekend attempts at meeting new people and our scores of cover letter/resume combos, we still have to live our daily lives, whether we attend school, wait tables, or take advantage of the pause in life progress to try the programs we know we’ll never have time for again once the BSF has been defeated.

There come moments in this day-to-day living where we may decide: forget it, I’ll defy convention. Let’s start our own path, our own way to dodge the BSF. Travel! Start a business! Inherit billions! Become a reality superstar! This discovery is elating. You may feel like you want to shove your new method in the faces of all the other yuppies with their suits and ties, and sing defiant anthems from the rooftops. This is ill-advised.

Whether or not the action is metaphorical, shoving your plans at other people while screeching My Chemical Romance will get you egged.

Whatever you do (especially if your battle with the BSF has, like mine, forced you to take repeated trains to Flatbush), never wait for public transportation in the rain, in Brooklyn, while listening to Radiohead.

I don’t care if you’re the most cheerful, luckiest person alive. Trips to Brooklyn in bad weather accompanied by depressing alternarock will turn you suicidal. And it will take many comforting phone calls, multiple favorite movies, and several types of pie to get you out of that funk.

If you do decide to face the BSF in your every waking hour, whether by job searching full-time or studying for big tests and kissing professor butt, beware. Tackling one head can often weaken your fight against the other. And even if it doesn’t, occasions like this may arise:

If this happens, no one will care how stressed you are or how good your intentions. You have become a jerk, the opposite of the admirable time-organizer/prioritizer I discussed back in December.

I think it’s safe to say that at some point, we’ve all tried almost every one of these approaches to dealing with our impending future. And as Jews, we may feel the added pressure of knowing that we’re expected to answer these questions sooner than we thought. 22 is very, blissfully young. I’ve heard that statement more often than I’ve heard advertisements guarantee satisfaction or my money back. And yet at times I feel like I can see 30 rounding a corner. I can name at least a dozen girls I know who were married before 21, and many more friends of mine who seem to have found their perfect job/mate/apartment/sword to slay the BSF. We seem to have forgotten that we’re still at the beginning of our journey.

On bad days, this thought depresses me, and I have to resort to one of the above methods of distraction (wipes tomato off face and accepts pudding sheepishly). But on better ones, I can remember, with a deep breath and a smile, that worrying about it now will not allow me to tame the BSF any sooner, and I decide to enjoy the time I have (I think that link illustrates my point better than I do, and the song partly inspired this post).

Because no matter what, I’ll have to meet the BSF eventually. Hopefully, I won’t have to fail in too many attempts before I finally stroll, victorious into the sunset. And having typed this, I realize that this sentence alone gives me reason to hope, because despite my fears and nightmares, I still see myself coming away from it happy, having found what I’m looking for, even if it’s only a long while from now.

And that can only mean I haven’t let the BSF beat me yet.

Priorities

If you’re in college, finals are just around the corner. The week and a half or so wherein all of us become labor-intensive zombies, freaking out about information we will have forgotten by next month and deleting our facebook profiles until it’s all over. Every semester goes like this with only slight variations, whether you’re in pre-med or fine arts.

That being said, I’ve got to add a note for all studiers out there, who are probably only reading this out of reasons of procrastination. I can accept that. And the note is this: I’m proud of my best friend.

My close friend, or CF as he will be known from here on in, is the kind of person who always has something to do. He’s got school, multiple jobs, friends, hobbies, and life for him sometimes seems to the outside viewer like a complex juggling act. Occasionally he’s so bogged down with work that he disappears from the face of the earth, and cannot be reached by phone, email, or smoke signals.

I’m sure this scenario sounds familiar to some of you. You know who you are. But honestly, I think we all get that way sometimes. I spent the last two weeks in a similar state.

At some point last month, as CF was studying for a Big College Test and was neck-deep in his time of vanishing from the planet, he found the time to tell me a story. There’s no point in repeating it, the story’s not important. The main thing is the conclusion he came to.

He was having a conversation with me, a friend, nay, a human being, instead of studying at this particular moment. Because, as he said as story-coda:

“People are still more important than a test.”

Wild.

It’s insane how often we forget that. I spent all of high school forgetting that. Some people still forget that, I’m sure (evil eyes where appropriate). Most of school time, and especially when finals roll around, we bury ourselves so deep into our books and our work and our facts, facts, figures, that when we finally emerge into the blinding sun of vacation, we don’t know how to function. We have come back into society after a long prison sentence. Like Tarzan back in Victorian England after years in the Congo. Like the Count of Monte Cristo back from the Chateau D’If. Like…you get it.

So it’s that much harder to remember the world outside the four walls of final exams when you’re smack in the middle of them. That’s when moments like these arise:

I imagine CF had a similar thought process during his moment of epiphany, though that’s probably not true at all. CF, excuse the cartoon. It’s illustrating my point if not your experience.

So you've taken your Big College Test. Now what? Your trial is over, but someone else is still in the thick of it. In my case, the thick of it is not so much a ten-page exam of Scantron questions, but more a several-poster-series of artwork. While economics majors have their nervous breakdowns and collapse snoring onto their textbooks, we art students reach the crash point in an entirely different way:At this point, any and all movement is futile.

The studio is cold and damp. Once your studio-mate leaves, you are the only person with the keys to this place. You are utterly isolated in a cage of your Senior Project. If you overdosed on turpentine stench, no one would think to look for you for weeks. It’s a terrifying horror zone of alone, alone, alone and covered in cardstock shavings and paper cement.

But then…

Someone is making contact! Someone remembers your existence! If you overdosed on terps now, someone would find you before the campus opossums did! You are rejuvenated...

...And you can work again. Because with one word, someone reminded you that yes, this too shall pass. And yes, someday you will be on vacation, and then you can get back to having a life with the rest of your friends.

And so to everyone who finds themselves neck-deep in responsibility, best of luck. You’ll get out of it soon enough. And if you do horribly on those tests, that’s okay too. I can almost guarantee you won’t be thinking about that when you tell your grandkids your boring life story.

It’s still the people that count. Please remember that, and don’t lose sight of the fact we so often forget: a test is a piece of paper that counts for some things. But not everything. A test is not life. It’s still the people that count. And to whoever over the course of the past two weeks was on the sending end of such a rejuvenating text message (yes, that was me lying on the studio floor), thank you. You never know when the tiniest word of greeting will make a miserable, overworked student’s day.

See you on the other side. Good luck on finals, everybody!