Alison is feeling the stress of impending graduation.

May 15th is just around the corner. That's when I graduate. Ready for a blast from the past? Here's an excerpt from my xanga blog back in highschool, fairly shortly after graduating highschool.

July 8th, 2006:
When I graduated, everyone kept asking me how I felt. I didn't know then, because it kind of didn't feel real. Like I was just a junior or something, and would just be there next year, so I wasn't sad. But slowly it has dawned upon me that I'm done with highschool for good.

Sure, I'm looking forward to the future, but does it scare me? Oh, heck yes. I keep getting these moments where it's like those times when I was younger and on roller blades and I would start to go faster than I wanted down a hill or something, and I got that split-second realization that there was no way I could slow down. And the roller blades would start to slip right out from under me, and I would flail my arms around and hope that maybe, just maybe, I can regain control, or at least not crash painfully.

Life feels like that sometimes, slipping right out of my control, going way faster than I intended, and the best I can hope for is to stay upright.

As you can tell from my elaborate analogy, I wind up feeling like that alot, and have had many chances to connect it with a similar feeling.

The phrase "Stop the world, I want to get off." keeps coming to mind.

Back to now. I survived this stress before, it can be done again..

The real world is out there, and I am so scared. I've had my life revolve around my education and school schedule since I was 5. Over 3/4 of my life has been in a classroom, or completely governed by when school was going on, or when we were on break, when things were due, what people I was around and when... What is life like without that? I'm excited to find out, but also just nervous about the uncertainty of it.

I guess I worry that I'm stepping off the edge of that stage in my robe and wacky square cap... into a great void that I can't see into, and only hear vague descriptions from people who have gone into that void.

Alison's slow descent into madness, er, I mean, hipster. (I really meant madness.)

The other day, Sunday to be precise, I made my first pair of jorts. Jean shorts. Cut about 2 inches above the knee and then rolled into a small cuff.

What have I become?

I find myself wanting to build up a fixed gear bicycle and get a tattoo. I want to dye my hair strange colors and wear it long and messy. I want to wear stupidly huge glasses, just because they make my face look alien. I want to be skinny and androgynous and wild. I want to shuck off the self-centered, greedy, capitalist-whore mindset that I have been culturally socialized to have, and live like a gypsy, but buy expensive clothing that looks like it was thrown out in a bygone decade and dragged under a truck for half a block.




Okay, only the first two things on that list are true, the bike and the tattoo. But how far behind is the rest? The lifestyle of reckless abandon of the hipster appeals to me. To just bail on all my responsibilities, and live for the moment. I think that maybe they will regret these moments someday, like that stupid tattoo that prevents them from getting a job later, or the liver failure from their drunken youth.

Back to the jorts. They are so comfortable, yet trendy. And dare I say it, practical? They re-purpose my jeans with the ripped knees into something I can wear. Are they really that bad? Do they really signal a descent into hipster? I don't really think I could even be hipster, not in Manhattan, KS. It's too small and far removed from the meccas of the hipster populous: Chicago, Portland, some places on the East Coast.

Also, I don't find myself having the attitude of a hipster. I feel like, more than anything they wear, the attitude of the hipster is what defines them. More-aware-than-thou, more-trendy-than-thou, more-different-and-unique-and-special-and-oh-please-god-someone-notice-me-than-thou.

I think it's a product of the fact that our generation is just tacked on to the end of many influential ones that had huge defining events that formed the portrait of it's members. Generation Y? What do we have? Affluent parents who didn't give us a reason to strive for anything, no reason to get out there and "make something of ourselves", no drive to achieve because we have things just fall in our laps. We follow up Generation X, our parents, who are characterized by a love of money and a lack of art, and do the complete opposite. Liberal arts colleges filled with film majors and philosophy majors, getting their tuition paid by well-off parents. Hipsters are a revolution touting their love of having nothing but art, funded by financial excess.


But yeah, jorts are neat. I might make more.