(Mike Hirshon | Student Life)

Our plans, however, unwound into a mildly disgruntling but still quite exciting journey, us having found an adult block party in the middle of Euclid, complete with a dancing deck of cards and many women (and men) dressed up as tawdry-looking Disney characters. Because of all the drunken debauchery, I would assume, no one within a three-block radius would open their doors to a bunch of poor, pathetic college students. Still, it was all too funny to see.

Decked in a scarf and pants about five sizes too small for me, I realized that no one truly ever grows up.

Life has a tendency to put restrictions on us as we grow older: Play nicely with others, go to college, pay your own cell phone bill, get a good job, stop picking your nose. The list goes on, and we wrap ourselves in these costumes of “adults,” responsible, caring, good citizens who contribute to the greater good, and try our hardest to keep order, peace and reverence and not hit our cousin Jimmy when he tries to steal our Tonka trucks.

Adulthood is an expectation that has afflicted generations and generations before us as we maintain propriety rather than express how we truly feel. Oftentimes, it isn’t adult-like to act silly and let loose. We become so caught up in what we have to do that we forget who we used to be; we’ll put on the suit or the corporate mask or the soccer-mom wig, and when we finally do look at ourselves in the mirror, we don’t even know what is staring back at us.

The block party, though, is proof that given an opportunity, the child in us will get out. All it takes is one occasion, one little chance to revert back to adolescence, or even childhood, and adults will jump at the opportunity, whether responsibly or irresponsibly.

If adulthood is so uncomfortable, why do we bother trying to perform as adults? I don’t mean to say that we should just let everything fall into anarchy, and I know we do have to behave responsibly, but why is there so much tension in the world? Why do we kill ourselves putting on this image of some stereotype that is generations old? We’re all trying to do well in school or in our jobs so we can make a better life for ourselves, yes, but if we don’t take a second to look around—past the textbooks and the minivans and the taxes—we will miss what life is about.

It is more than just this performance starring the over-18 crowd. From time to time, we need to look back and see where we came from. We need to laugh, enjoy ourselves and be who we are, free from worries about what anyone else will think.

I can tell you from experience that some pants are just too tight to wear and should not be seen on your body or mine. Step out from your imposed adulthood and seriousness, and I think you’ll find that it’s much easier to breathe.

Why would you ever do anything that is not fun? That is what I ask them. The answers are invariably some form of either “I don’t know” or “because I have to.” Neither of those is a sufficient reason to do something unenjoyable.

Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” How could you do something without knowing why? Motivation is the key to every action. The only way to truly and completely do anything—and do it well—is to know why it must be done. And all motivation comes from within. The reason that anyone does anything comes from within. Not knowing your motivation simply means that what you are doing is not well thought out.

As to requirements, they are irrelevant. We all have to do things. But we oftentimes get a choice of what those things are, and even when we don’t, the simple fact that an action is required of us does not in any way preclude it from being fun. It is simply an issue of framing or gaming.

For instance, throughout the course of my college career, I have had to write a few essays. I have not particularly wanted to write the vast majority of them. That, however, is a very negative way of viewing the essays. Instead of trying to write something I did not want to write, I changed the topic of the essay to something I wanted to write about. This makes the process fun. Also, passion shines through in writing and improves it. By framing the essays in a way that made them fun to write, I improved their quality.

Some things are hard to frame. Sometimes, you have to walk for a long stretch all alone. You have no one to talk to. Maybe it’s raining. Casting this in a positive light is going to be tough. Why not play a game? Maybe you watch other walkers—solitary or otherwise—and come up with backstories for them. Maybe you relive the last great moment you had. Maybe you just fantasize about being in a different place. Maybe you take a Superball out of your pocket and start bouncing it as you go. No matter what you do, though, simply by doing something you enjoy, you’ve taken a dull and boring walk and turned it into something much, much more.

Robert Heinlein once wrote, “Man is the animal that laughs.” Oscar Wilde wrote, “Life is far too important a thing to ever talk seriously about it.” Let loose. Have fun. Do what you like; like what you do. Not only is it the best way to live life, but it is also the only way to live life well.

I’ve been there, Charlie. I’ve come back from three months of gray cubicle walls and appreciated the variety and vibrancy of Washington University more than I did before. I’ve sat in front of a computer for eight hours and copied and stapled and gotten up early, and I’ve realized that we have it good.

But here’s the deal. Charlie is representative of a frighteningly overwhelming mentality at Wash. U. that commits to a great passion for activity in college (extracurriculars, drunkenness both included) because of its awareness of the great banality of post-University life. “Well, this is it,” many of us conclude. “Where’s the bottle-opener?”

The ’geist is even more potent as many of us enter senior year. “Oh, right, you’re a senior,” underclassmen will say, reminded. And even September, fall semester, we grimace and wave our arms. “No, no, don’t say that!” we plead. I don’t even want to think about our responses when we’re late-April almost-laureates.
I wonder this about that: If you’ve been attending Washington University for four years, and you’ve all along been preparing your mind and your body for intrinsic excellence, and you’ve identified one or two things you are passionate about within the college environment, AND you have no sense of excitement about the unknown that “faces us” after we graduate with really good-looking degrees and critical mindsets meant to engage and change the universe, what the hell is wrong with you?

To put it a little less offensively, it seems to me that if you haven’t acquired a sense of adventure, of taking on the new, of seizing opportunities in a competitive environment while you’ve been at Wash. U., you’ve essentially been sitting at home for the last four years letting your mom make you grilled cheese and cut it into sailboats.

If you don’t want to sit in a cubicle and be really, really boring when you graduate from college, don’t. If your options are go to Chicago and wait tables 10 hours a day and then come home to your miniscule apartment and write fiction until you fall asleep, or kill a year before you go to med school by saving baby animals from man-made ecological disasters in Alaska, or work on a cooperative vineyard in Greece until you get bored or lonely and feel like coming back to the States, I’d say things are looking pretty good.

You can do whatever you want to do. If the real world looks bad, it’s because you’ve resigned yourself to a life that is stupid and won’t work for you. The real world is whatever you want it to be. You have to make money. But you don’t have to make that much.

It’s an open field. Washington University is supposed to have been your training facility. You’re young. Run.

Of course if you followed last week’s news of the odd, than you almost certainly know where I’m going with this. An offensive lineman at a Division II school chose football over a finger. Let me say that again: when told he needed season-ending surgery on his dislocated pinky, he told the doctors just to lop it off so that he could play. Now, before you pronounce final judgment on this guy, you should note two arguments that can be made in support of his choice. The first is that football’s been his life since he was playing Pop Warner, and now he’s a senior with just a couple of games left in his career. The second is that a person can survive without one little pinky.

Be that as it may, however, this is just the latest publicized account of athletes prioritizing sports over life. How often do we hear after the fact that someone took the field with a broken this or a torn that? More often than not, playing injured backfires and the quarterback throws four interceptions or the pitcher gives up eight runs. Yet the most shocking part about all this, at least to me, is that the injury often becomes the source of blame for the poor performance. Coaches are likely to say that someone didn’t have their “A” game because they were injured, instead of bringing up the fact that they shouldn’t have been playing at all. One would think the reason behind this is to avoid criticism for allowing an athlete to play injured, but this isn’t the case. In fact, I constantly hear the media rip athletes who don’t play as being “soft,” when any doctor would call it a basic concern for one’s well-being.

Yes, clichés like “chicks dig scars” and “pain is temporary, pride lasts forever” can be found a dime a dozen in our culture today, and it’s generally valid to argue that a professional athlete playing a little banged up is just like the office worker who goes in with a cold. But even for the toughest of the tough, there is a threshold beyond which the only option is calling in sick. If I’ve got a 102 fever, I stay in a day or two and get better. I don’t go to class, where I might only make my illness worse.

All of this seems like it should be common sense, but evidently to people like Trevor Wikre (of the amputated pinky), there are some things more important than a measly appendage. Who knows, maybe he’ll be able to milk all this publicity for enough TV appearances to let him live happily for the rest of his life. But what happens if he finishes his football career, maybe in the process even winning some awards or leading his team deep into the playoffs, only to find that perhaps he was a bit rash in getting rid of that finger, that having 10 fingers instead of nine might just have made the rest of his life a lot easier? Unlikely, yes, but it could happen.