My favorite part of the Blue Zone is how Parking Services ensures an abundance of spaces, especially toward the very end of the lot because they clearly understand that those of us who are fortunate enough to live off-campus enjoy an even further commute. Oh, but what’s even better than that is my arrival to West Campus, where I can no longer freely use my iPod without being subjected to the venomous stares and verbal bitch slaps of jealous iPod-less upperclassmen. Little do they know that this freshman, and by freshman I mean senior who bought his own baby blue-covered iPod, was already running late for class and hardly ready to start the year. Welcome to the final season of the Class of 2005.
Sorry to say, but we won’t be picked up for another season, and we will all enter syndication, otherwise known as the real world. Oh yes, we have heard this all before, about four years ago just before we all left our previous shows to do this spin-off. That’s the pitch the powers that be tried to sell us with: That college was the real world and this would be the most important crossroad that you will ever come to. Unfortunately, the network didn’t tell you about that small tiny clause in your contract, that this was a complete lie because it’s happening all over again. So instead, if this, senior year, is the real season in which you make your most important decisions about jobs and careers and pretty much the rest of your life, tying up all those loose-ended plot lines and finishing up character development, does that mean that we are finally being cancelled? No more spin-offs, no more cameos, no more anything, just real world syndication?
For the first time, those monotonous “What did you do during the summer?” morphed into “So, what do you think you might be doing after graduation?” At least for me, I couldn’t find the cue card with a response for that one. Of course, I could take the route of those characters that use the lines of job-resume-internship-D.C. as if it gave them a perpetual nerd-anal orgasm each time they gloated. And then there is always what Duke is known best for, at least according to us, the pre-professional lines of LSAT-MCAT characters, whose egos are just as inflated as their GPAs. I didn’t understand why I couldn’t bring myself to utter these lines wholeheartedly.
I mean, I wanted to go to law school and eventually get a job, so why was I so disillusioned?
It then dawned upon me why I believed senior year was the final season, forever cancelled and into syndication. Although a very important part of it, the past three seasons were never really centered on our careers, goals and “what do you think you might be doing after graduation,” and neither should the final season. Instead, more so, it was about us. It was about our personal culture, our lifestyles, our dreams, our hopes, our failings, our suffering, our relationships and the human condition. These crossroads that we encounter will always continue so long as you let them be about yourself as a whole and not as yourself entirely as a career or a job. As we all anxiously wait to see how our final seasons will develop, it’s important not to ask “What do you want to do with your life?” but rather, “How do you want to live your life?” Professions are necessary, if not compulsory, but the decision to enter one should only be a part of the grander pitch of how you would want to live your life, continuing your personal culture and lifestyle as it exists now or envisioning a bold new look to your post-university spin-off.
As the final season begins to take shape, bring it to a final climax and a satisfying resolution, but don’t resolve everything and keep things open-ended. Go to med school or work in D.C. or do nothing at all, but don’t do it because you haphazardly answered “What do you want to do with your life?” instead of “How you want to live your life?” Maintain a balance between that which is scripted and planned goals and that which is un-scripted and unexpected. Don’t go blindly into syndication. The show must go on, but then again, it’s just a show, right?
Charles Gomez is a Pratt senior.
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