i am just like the rest of my kind

i'm in a particularly writerly mood today. which generally is a result of me having had huge swathes of time on my hands and have filled them by musing over my life, and those musings needed space outside of my brain, thus i feel compelled to let some of them ooze into sentences and paragraphs.

this american life ran a show the first week of may which was titled "this week." in that one hour of air time they covered events that occurred just in the week prior. they got a big break with the biggest news of the last couple months falling in that week, the announcement of the death of osama bin laden, but they covered lots of smaller, less typically newsworthy events as well. like a young couple with conservative, strongly religious parents were moving in together, a kid was learning to ride a bike, and a young twenty-something girl, freshly graduated from college moved back home.

the latter was the most compelling, not necessarily because the girl was compelling. i was more intrigued by the interviewer. he had been a this american life intern the year before. and despite a dream internship, he had graduated jobless and like his interviewee had returned home. he called that time the most depressing six months of his life.

i am those kids. and it punches you in the gut. you know that you've got skills and talents and abilities and ambition and work ethic, but for some reason, you can't move yourself. maybe for some people it's because the won't settle for anything less than exactly what they want. and what they want doesn't want them, at least right now. however, for me, i am stuck because i am a chicken. i hate rallying recommenders and doling out application fees. i hate answering the little essay questions about why i believe children are our future, or explaining a time when i had to communicate to an unreceptive listener, or how i could contribute to the company.

whatever it is that keeps me and the thousands of kids who swarmed to their parents' basements last year and last may in our childhood bedrooms, it is draining us. i feel less motivated than i ever have in my life. i feel depressed, not necessarily clinically (although, i am a frequent online depression test taker, usually scoring mild to moderate), but i am more inclined to spend all day reading other people's blogs or watching tv than moving my ambitions along.

i am not where i thought i would be on the cusp of 23. but i had pretty high hopes for myself. but i wouldn't brand myself a failure. my friend recently pointed out Florence and the Machine lives with her parents. being a bamboccione isn't wrong for everybody. but i think living with the parents for me is a symbol of something bigger, a symbol of the suppression of my dreams for cowardice. for fear of failure.

but, baby, when you've got nothing you've got nothing to lose.

thank you, bob dylan.

i think i will now listen to "like a rolling stone" and make a list of goals, as i often do when i feel like it is time to crawl out of my "rut."