Square One

"There has to be something else," Angelita said. Shit, I thought. She was going to press further. I had nothing.

I was in the middle of watching Pardon the Interruption for the second time when she called. Angelita is the student affairs coordinator at the political science department, a woman with whom I have exchanged hundreds of e-mails and 15 or 20 phone calls without ever having seen in person. She could be 25 or 75, and I would never know. Apparently during the commencement ceremony the dean lists off a few of a student's accomplishments and then his future plans before handing him his diploma. "Haeyon was chair of the International Law Review for three years and is an Arthur K. Gimball Scholarship Award Winner. He will be spending the summer with the Peace Corps before returning to Harvard Law School in the fall." Since the quantifiable portions of my Stanford experience were pretty bleak, Angelita didn't have much to work with.

"Were you in any leadership positions?"

"Uh." The next five seconds passed in awkward silence.

"Well, what about sports? Awards?"

I thought for a second before deciding that the comedic value of hearing Senior Professor Terry Moe solemnly read off "Dan is an intramural dodgeball and softball champion" would be lost on my parents. Furthermore, the fact that there were seven NCAA national champions graduating in the political science department alone made that glowing accolade seem more than a little shabby, like I was breaking down in tears upon being named MVP of my Little League team. Ultimately, I settled on some grossly overblown phrase like "Dan was named Outstanding Sports Columnist of Volume 226 at the Daily." a prize for which I was awarded a $20 gift certificate to the bookstore. I immediately used it to buy a Jurassic 5 CD.

What had I done with the time? I had spent three years at one of the best undergraduate universities in the country and I couldn't come up with two suitable accomplishments for the dean to read at commencement. Even if I hadn't been surrounded by a universe of people who would be working for the Thai embassy or Goldman-Sachs or studying at Wharton, I still would have been a failure on paper. In comparison to my peers', my collegiate career was the equivalent of getting a degree in dockworking or janitorial sciences. I might as well have enrolled in the masters program for Hobo Studies. I can see myself now in four years, wiping someone's windshield with my diploma like Gil from "The Simpsons," offering to recite baseball statistics for spare change.

This state of affairs would be much worse, though, if I had some singular talent that I was wasting. I am not smart in the traditional sense. I have no academic field of expertise. I settled on political science because it was a 70-unit major (as opposed to most of the 120-unit engineering course loads) and because I had accidentally fulfilled the basic requirements my freshman year. Even if you sat me down and told me a $200k/year job depended on it, I could not put together a coherent argument about nation-building in sub-Saharan Africa or the relative merits of a proactive nuclear defense initiative.

When I was getting ready to graduate from high school I had the opposite problem. I had the most impressive resume I could have possibly accumulated without having really done anything. Despite a stratospheric GPA and a community service record that would have impressed Mother Teresa, I had nothing that I could honestly point to as important to me - a purpose that would give my life meaning. I thought seriously about joining the military. I had decided early on that to be a man there were only two acceptable career paths: make as much money as possible, or dodge bullets and blow up ragheads. I'm actually surprised that more middle-class kids don't sign up sometimes. Maybe recruiters just think it's a lost cause to go after guys who could just as easily spend the next four years at Swarthmore instead of Camp Pendleton or Okinawa. I knew there had to be more like me - teenage suburban kids disgusted with the abyss between the trivial shit that other people praised them for and the real currency of manhood. If I hadn't been born with a lung capacity that I found would classify me as 4-F, I would have gladly shipped out. In all honesty, though, I'm not sure I could cut it. For all the complaining about an army built from the ranks of the poor, I would sure as hell want a strike team of West Texas linebackers defending my country over a group of bickering Ivy League students. The singleness of purpose that comes from having nothing left to lose will make you braver than you ever thought you could be.

More than anything else, I'd always wanted that purpose. I hated being a student. I hated not feeling like I had earned anything. I was desperate to believe that somehow, some way, I could escape the quarantined environment of private school where success is all but mailed directly to your house. I fucking hate the army of Christophers and Matthews that clogs America's business schools, the guys who can look back on life at age 70 and point to their vacation to Tuscany that made them realize What Life Is All About. I want to be a man, a provider, a soldier who has something more than the completion of a meaningless liberal arts degree. If anything, I hated graduating, because it gave a legitimate title to the enormous pile of bullshit credibility I have been accumulating over the past seven years. I want to get dropped into a jungle somewhere and find my own way out. If that's what it takes, I'll dump everything and start from the bottom.

Which is essentially what I'm doing right now.