The Brown Man's Burden

(WARNING: This post will be sappy and self-obsessed. If you are looking for entertaining procrastination I suggest that guys click here and girls click here. I will address the problematic nature of that last sentence in a future post.)

I am suffering through my first bout of senior depression and figure that I can probably blog my way out of it. So here goes.

The last few months have been my favorite at Brown since my first few months in Unit 26 freshman year. I've got multiple jobs that require little work and all of my classes are really interesting. However, as I sat in Engin 9 today, my mood started to change for the worse.

Hazeltine was being his normal loveable self while imploring the class for reassurance that his teaching method was effective.

"Am I making sense here? Does anyone understand a goddamn thing I'm saying?"

We were talking about how best to market birth control pills in Bangladesh when the memories and feelings began to flood in. For those that don't know, one of my many nicknames in high school (besides Angry Black Man, etc.) was "Bangla" or "Bangla-Deezy" - short for Bangladesh. No, I'm not part-Indian/Arab/whatever or anything. Its just that it was cool at the time to refer to people by their first intital and last name -- in my case B English. A friend of mine suggested that when you said B English fast enough, it sounded like Bangladesh and so the name stuck.

Anyways, mentions of Bangladesh invariably make me think of home. Usually at the beginning of the school year I am very homesick for the urban/suburban landscape of the Heights but this was not so much an issue this year for a number of reasons. Primary among them: I was only in town for a couple weeks I couldn't get too reattached, so many people have come and gone that the home I long for is for the most part non-existant, and I have filled my longing with an emerging love of Providence.

However, the most major reasons for the smooth transition this year was my large extended Brown family and Brown's plethora of ugly white girls.

I guess I should explain the latter first. As I will explain in a future posting, my thesis (hopefully), and sort of explained in the links in the introduction, guys are taught to transfer feeling of pain, despair and weakness into anger, transcendence, and strength. This may be problematic and unhealthy but it is also very effective (I learned that lesson in high school - hence, the angry black man).

In this case, I have transferred my longing for the beautiful Black people of Cleveland into pointing and laughing at ugly white girls (and confused white men with sweaters tied around their necks, for that matter). And at Brown there is no shortage of targets ripe for ridicule. Is it just me or is everyone else shocked by the proponderence of white people, asian people, ugly people, and gay people at this university. Quite frankly, they're all a bit much.

Equally as important in my smooth transition has been all the cool people that I'm glad to see back from various locations around the world. There's a real freshman year feeling of treating college like summer camp instead of job training that makes me think this might be our best year at Brown.

This is where the depression comes in. After this year, that's it. Obviously, this is something I figured out before today but I rationalized myself into believing that college wasn't all that great and my post-college career would be really interesting. However, listening to Hazeltine talk about some consumerism bullshit that I wasn't trying to hear and getting these career services e-mails telling me to show up to the Faculty Club to kiss some financial firm's ass is not my idea of a good time. And of course, I live by the mantra "Above all else, have a good time."

However, its not that simple. I think every Brown graduate feels a number of burdens on their life after they leave college (besides loan repayments). First burden: you should do something worthy of your Brown degree. Obviously, this is up for lots of interpretation but it seems to me that that limits you to a few options:

1. Do something to help save the world.
2. Do something only really smart/educated people can do.
3. Get rich.

The second burden that I think most of us feel is that we should we take care of our families. That means that we should probably pursue option 3 (if possible in tandem with option(s) 1 and/or 2).

A third burden probably only refers to certain segments of the Brown population: the burden to help those who you've left behind (read that however you'd like). That usually means get rich and give back. That makes things interesting because getting rich usually requires selling out but not giving back also carries with it the stigma of selling out.

Having written this, though, I actually feel a lot better. Yeah, burdens exist but I don't have to deal with them now. I have the rest of my 20's to be a poor, useless drain on society. I can save these larger questions for a mid-life crisis down the line.

In the meantime, I can take simple pleasure out of shit like this:

• This guy is the Thai me.
• Shame on you Florida Marlins. You're still my favorite NL team but you should reward this type of behavior, not punish it.
• And finally, this is why I always order General Tzo's.