Today was my last day with the seniors, as they move on to spend the last few days of their high school careers practicing how to walk across a stage. I’m not really the sentimental type when it comes to my job, but I did feel the need to share some brief parting pieces of advice with my seniors, those things I wish someone had told me when I was their age, before they head off into their idea of the “real world” - be it to college, the workforce, the military, or elsewhere:

1. Remember that credit cards are not free money.
2. Write things down. Your crazy experiences. Your funny moments. Your heartache. Your anger. A disturbing conversation you overhead from the frat boys behind you in Anthropology 101. Your mind is a trap at 18 and you remember everything. That starts to go away pretty quick into your adulthood. So, write it down.
3. Help. Is dad out there working in the garden this summer? Is mom changing your car’s oil for you? Is grandpa putting up a new deck? Pick up some pruners, the oil pan, or a hammer and go help them. Ask them questions about what they’re doing. See if they’ll let you help them with something that you had no interest in doing last summer. It’ll be awkward. You’ll feel weird because it’ll be the most you’ve talked to them in three years, but do it. You won’t regret it for a variety of reasons.
4. Become fluent in another language. You’re almost there anyway after three years of Spanish. Okay, okay… maybe not. I know you swore it off after your last final, but keep up on it. Don’t keep putting off the Spanish elective in college until “next semester” or you’ll never do it. Suck it up and do it. Download a Rosetta Stone to your iPod. Turn on Univision and make a drinking game out of it to see who is the best interpreter (when you’re 21, of course). The future job-hunting you will thank you.
5. Go places. Take every opportunity to travel that you can. Go on adventures. Stop at restaurants that aren’t Taco Bell. Eagerly offer to help your friend move out to Mobridge, South Dakota. Meet people. Eat weird foods. It’s okay if you gag. Take that study abroad, dang it, because those few extra thousand dollars are nothing compared to the experiences that you will have. Go out of your comfort zone, remembering that no one in these places you explore will ever see you again and it’s okay to embarrass yourselves. 
6. Use condoms. Please.
7. Read one book each month. I know, you laugh. You’re graduating high school, why would you ever pick up a book again? Heck, you didn’t read most of them anyway. But it doesn’t have to be a big book. It can even have pictures and no one will yell at you. So, if you don’t have one, go get a library card and look around for a while. You’ll be surprised when they aren’t being assigned to you how many books will catch your eye - and the knowledge you’ll gain with each book you read is invaluable. Besides… reading is sexy.
8. Embrace your mistakes. You are going to screw up. You’re going to do unbelievably stupid things. For most of you, like it was for me, this will happen often. Don’t shy away from these mistakes. Own up to them. Learn from them. Then move on from them.
9. Remember, when your first big breakup comes, it won’t be the end of the world. It will feel like it. You’ll probably rip some of your hair out. Your friends will be sick of your crying. You’ll be disheveled, drinking expired milk out of the carton, and wondering how the world will ever go on. Just remember: it does. And you will too. Instead of moping around, get a gym membership. That metabolism just doesn’t work like it used to anyway. Better yet, go volunteer somewhere. Coach Special Olympics. Have some coffee at the senior home. Give tours to kids at the zoo. Not only will you feel better about yourself, you might even meet a cute dude or total babe. And cute dudes and total babes love people who volunteer. 
10. Budget. Don’t be afraid to spend it, because you have to live a little, but be smart with your money. Remember: stopping at Starbucks before school or work will cost you $900 over the course of a year. Getting the cheap stuff at the convenience store will cost you $500 (even with those buy 8, get 1 free cards they give you). Brewing your own will cost you $150. Keep that lesson in mind for every aspect of where you’re allocating your hard-earned cash.

This is not a end-all list of advice that will lead young people to successful lives. Rather, it’s what I’ve learned along the way, a guy who was there not too long ago and wishes he knew then what he knows now.

I don’t make it a habit to complain, particularly about situations out of my control (and moreso money… most find it tacky), but I’m feeling cranky after seeing some quotes. I don’t really understand why dental insurance doesn’t cover braces, particularly for adults. My dental plan covers 100% diagnostic, preventative, restorative, endodontics, periodontics, dentures, and oral surgery - but braces do not fall under any of these categories.

Which is really just awful.

I should be grateful for having any dental insurance. And I am. But I could easily pay out of my pocket the $40 needed every six months for my routine checkup, cleaning, and free toothbrush with my dentist’s name on it.

But for braces, I’ll have to pay out of my pocket $4,800 for the traditional or $6,500 for the lingual (which are secured behind the teeth instead of the front, which is ideal for an adult in the professional world).

That’s over 1/5th of my yearly after-taxes salary. One-fucking-fifth.

That’s a car. A down payment on a house, for chrissakes.

Here’s the rub. I’m not (and wouldn’t be) interested in braces for “cosmetic” reasons. My teeth have always been nice enough and even if they weren’t, it wouldn’t much bother me. I’m interested in braces because my longtime dentist said I more or less have to get them. Unless, of course, I want dentures when I’m older.

Notice the lisp in my latest video? I didn’t have that in high school. It’s developed because my teeth are shifting and, in combination with the alignment of my jaw, it’s causing my lower teeth to grind on my two front teeth. In simple terms, my dentist explained that those bastard bottom teeth of mine have been slowly grinding away at my front two teeth these past few years. While I may not notice it now (other than the developed lisp, which frankly, I’m much too old to give a damn about - and hell, Bogart pulled it off), over the course of the next 15-20 years, they could grind away. Away, I tell you! And when a dentist tells a person that their teeth are going to slowly grind away… one is inclined to listen to the alternatives.

So, here I am. I don’t mind having to get braces. The students will get a kick out of it (we’ll look alike!) and I’m not the type of person to be embarrassed by such things. I’m nearly 26 years old, having worked my ass off to get a job with insurance where such worries could be non-issues and now I’m either going to chalk up $5,000+ (adding to the pile of debt already accumulated from being a broke college kid) or be dubbed Mr. McStubbtooth by the time I hit 40. That’s a lot of money and I’m not sure how any family affords it. I’m fortunate enough to be single and childless, so I can make it work, but damn. 

If the whole situation weren’t so goddamned loony, I might be furious. I just wouldn’t know who to be furious at. 

One late Friday night back in college, I was walking from one bar to the next and I saw a guy digging frantically through the passenger side of his parked Volkswagen Beetle. I noticed that he had looked at me, but I was more interested in getting my next cheap light beer than seeing if he needed help organizing a search party for whatever he needed in the interior of his car. 

“Hey man, could you help a guy out for a sec?” I heard after I had already passed the car.

I stopped, about-faced, and shrugged at the guy who was still on his knees, a frantic look in his eyes. “Sure. What’s up?”

“I lost my phone,” he said. “I think it’s in my car somewhere. Do you think if I gave you the number, you could call it?”

“Oh yeah,” I said. “No problem.”

And he gave me the number and I called it and we immediately heard it ring. He reached under the passenger seat and grabbed it effortlessly. 

“Oh man, thanks so much,” he said. “Where you headed?”

“No problem,” I replied. “Just over to the Hotel bar. Have a good night.” I then turned around to continue my trek towards the bar.

About an hour and three beers later, I received a text from the number of the Volkswagen owner.

• HIM: hey whats up?
• ME: Hi… everything okay?
• HIM: ya, i’m just drunk and a lil horny.
• ME: Well, those two often go hand in hand.
• HIM: u want to meet up later?
• ME: I’m flattered, but you’re not really my type.
• HIM: too much penis?
• ME: Yes, too much penis. But that was a nice move pretending that you lost your phone so you could get my number.
• HIM: busted. 
• ME: Have a nice night. If I run into you later, I’ll buy you a shot for the effort.

And as it would turn out, I ran into that tricky bastard later that night, bought him a shot of bourbon, and he admitted to me that his “lost my phone” trick had worked three times for him in the past. I was impressed. He was a sly one - although he could probably have worked on his subtleness. I generally preferred the “approach at bar and have a conversation” tactic for meeting women without the follow up “I’m horny” text afterwards, even then when I was at my craziest.

I always wonder what happened to these unique characters who I used to spend so much time with in college - Playboy Neil, Flapper Girl, Pakistani Princess, James Dean and Blagojevich (who always traveled together and looked exactly like their nicknames suggested)… we all had names for each other usually defined by our first encounters - our relationships based solely on the absurdity of the bar and eating late-night pizza afterwards that would leave the roofs of our mouth raw from our inability to wait for the pizza to cool down. I go through my phone and see contacts like “drunk birthday girl,” and “plaid shirt meathead,” and “pink shirt black skirt,” and “mxhtsiojgfd” and I know there are so many stories there that I am forgetting more and more of each day.

I should have written more down. Isn’t that always the case?

“Dreams. Dreams. Dreams. Wake up!”

Bill Cosby’s speech to the class of 2012 at Temple University’s 125th commencement.

My dream is to go Walden for a summer, disappear deep into the woods, live in a cabin, with only my books and pads of paper and food and a fishing pole. I’d only come into contact with people when essentials were needed, but refusing the temptation to read the news while doing so. Months later, I would emerge into society again and run into a friend who would say “Can you believe we are in another war?” and “What did you think of that movie?” and “Who would’ve predicted they’d win the NBA finals?” and I’d be able to look at him with complete unknowing and smile about it and maybe I would be cured of whatever it is that ails us all.

All rational thought disappears when I take a nap. I set my alarm to limit my nap to 35 minutes and when it goes off, my brain refuses to accept it.

“No, just twenty more minutes. I know for sure that I will be ready to wake up then.”

Reset my alarm. Twenty minutes pass and the alarm goes off.

“No, just twenty more minutes. I can just do my school work that is due at midnight tonight tomorrow.”

Reset my alarm. Twenty minutes pass and the alarm goes off.

“No, I’m just going to sleep forever. Fuck it. I’ll just drop out of school and quit my job. I love sleep so much.”

Do not reset my alarm. Continue sleeping. All is well.

There is a time period in my life referred to as my Bad Place. Many experience it in some form for some length of time: an era of sheer stupidity, self-loathing, and self-pity, orchestrated by a vulnerability brought on by a seemingly catastrophic event that is concerning no one but the person experiencing it. Logic temporarily excuses itself.

My bad place lasted around a year (some might argue two) before I started to come to terms with a breakup that had been inevitable anyway - something, of course, in hindsight that I am thankful for happening, but at the time left me embarrassingly devastated and irrationally bitter. The time, as is usually the case in people’s “bad places,” was a blur of watered down whiskey, cheap light beer, girls, and rapid social expansion - continual new friendships defined solely by the bar as I became known as a regular in numerous establishments. Weeknights extended to 3 AM. Responsibility waned. Late night pizza was king.

Sometime around three or four months after the break-up, during the first few weeks of the spring semester at Edinboro University, I began to notice an attractive young woman who sat behind me in one of my college geography classes. She had dark bangs that rested delicately on her brow, big brown eyes, a nose ring, and a slightly hipster five-and-dime look to her. She was different and I liked that - a certain Empty Keg attendee vibe, the town’s resident art student bar, rather than the Hotel or Boro, the more sorority scenes that I had spent most of my time at since my Bad Place began. Never have I been the nervous type, especially around females, but I felt rather queasy in my desire to talk to her - I remember specifically noting one morning how we were a few weeks into our class and I had not yet spoken to her. Would it not be perceived as strange to do so now? I wondered. I suppose that I had been too busy sitting in my seat, examining the posters on the wall for the forty-third time, and sipping my coffee in hopes of curing my hangover.

It took some time, but one morning, charm out of the equation, I struck up a forced and somewhat awkward conversation at the beginning of the class about our dorky, but nice professor - and, to her, I probably came off as the dorky, but nice classmate who sat in front of her. Which hadn’t been my intention.

Still, from that day forward, I made a point to talk to her before every class. Without the alcohol, pounding beats, and a dance floor sticky with rum and diets, I had apparently forgotten how to have a proper conversation with a female. We would speak about the class (“Did you get all of the homework done?”), the painfully obvious topic of weather (“Pretty cold outside today, huh?” “Well, it isFebruary in Edinboro.”), I’d poke fun at her terribly beaten up notebook, we’d cover mutual acquaintances, our shared interests in movies and music - and lo and behold, there it was: we discovered that we were both huge fans of this relatively unknown band at the time called The Walkmen. It was my in.

The following week, on the way to class, I swung by the Rite Aid and bought a new notebook. As I sat in my seat in front of her, I dropped the notebook on her desk, with faked apathy reserved for a middle schooler denying a crush, joking how she wouldn’t need to squish ten pages worth of notes onto the very last page of her tattered one any longer. She had, outwardly at least, thought that it was cute and thoughtful and this made me happy.

I soon found myself thinking about her outside of class. Maybe I’d throw a “get together” and invite her. Maybe I’d just see if she wanted to hit up the bar for a drink after class one day. Or I could get our mutual acquaintance to put in a good word for me. I kept pondering over scenarios for getting us together outside of class.

Then one day, in a moment of sheer brilliance, I bought two tickets to see The Walkmen who were playing just a short drive away in Pittsburgh, knowing that I would ask her to join me - what a perfect opportunity! - knowing that I could also easily find some other friend to go if she could not. The next class, I asked her - abruptly, awkwardly. She smiled politely and with little hesitation said that she couldn’t go that weekend due to work. Victoria’s Secret. Couldn’t request off at this point. I nodded knowingly and smiled back and said no problem, shrugging it off like I had only asked casually, maybe even on a whim, I just had these tickets sitting around anyway and I thought I’d throw the offer out there to her first, since she liked them and all. No big deal.

She was a bright young girl and I think she was smart enough to sense my vulnerability and confusion - or maybe it was just the stench of stale beer emitting from my pores and the second hand smoke radiating from being absorbed in my hair - and she intelligently wanted no part of it outside of the pleasantries that we exchanged in class.

I had taken her rejection of going to that concert as a rejection of me. After that, like a bitter teenager, I ceased my pursuit, never once making an effort to hang out with her outside of class again. She sensed my sudden undeserved coldness towards her in class - or if not coldness, then a forced indifference - and while we continued to have increasingly brief conversations at the semester winded down, we never spoke again after the last class.

There were similar incidents as the months passed, but I learned from them. I seemed to do better under the guise of booze and loud music and dimmed lights and I would be caught in that cycle for some time longer, slowly easing out my way out of it as adult responsibilities took precedence. It’s strange looking back at this time period, which was more than a few years ago now, and try to put myself back in that mindset. I was 21 and young and angry and confused. Nowadays, it seems to me as if that person was not I, as if the memories had been planted in my mind in some Matrix-like scheme. But it was me all right.

This tragic amusement of young adulthood is that it reveals our frailness. We can choose to deny it or hide it… or accept it. The Bad Place. Few, if any, of us are immune to the side-effects. One learns during it that we only have so much control - and once a person is made aware of their own absurdity and accepts it, there is no reason for that bitterness and self-pity to ever make an appearance again.

1. Complete taxes (so that I may receive my refund sooner to put it all on red at the casino).
2. Complete and submit the first modules of both my graduate courses (so that I can instantly be pinpointed as the overachieving asshole).
3. Finish my economics lessons for next week (so that I can be lazy and not stay late tomorrow). 
4. Wash, dry, and put away my laundry (emphasis on “put away,” so that I don’t leave the dry clothes in the bin overnight). 
5. Attempt to fix the passenger side mirror on my car (because it fell off when a deer tried to make its acquaintance). 
6. Finish reading The Wettest County in the World (because it’s about 1930s bootleggers and John Hillcoat is adapting this awesomeness). 

Okay, Jonnyboy, if you are rereading this - I know you are tired, but stay on task, damn it! Just make another cup for coffee.

I spent an unreasonable amount of time on the sixth floor of my old undergraduate campus library - escaping to the same small one-person desk by the window, doing work or reading, sometimes getting distracted by all of the books surrounding me, sometimes getting distracted by the cute girl in glasses at the desk facing me a few rows away, and, more often than I care to admit, sometimes taking an hour here and there to put in my down in an attempt to sleep off a hangover.

It’s been three years now since I’ve spent a significant amount of time on the campus and it’s strange coming back, if even for just a few moments, taking note of all the changes and improvements (where were those suites when I was a student?), driving by buildings I spent so much time in, seeing how young so many of the students look, chuckling as I pass houses and apartment buildings that I associate with blurred memories - some good, some bad, some so ridiculous that I sometimes have to question the validity of my memory. 

I don’t miss college. I don’t miss the stupidity, the irresponsibility, or the erratic schedule. I don’t miss sleeping until noon on Saturdays. I don’t miss the ease of the classes, the difficult first lessons in financial responsibility, the absurdity of a near nightly bar scene where pitchers of the light beer on special were all we could afford, or the seemingly endless stream of young women who, like me, were experiencing and enjoying freedom for the first time. I don’t miss these constant discoveries as I transitioned from teenager to adult. I might slightly miss bullshitting with professors and the uniqueness of a lifestyle crafted by meeting new people every week, people from all over the world who were just as wide-eyed and naive about their own freedom as I was, but I don’t miss much else.

Damn though, it was still fun.

When I was a child, all I wanted to be was a cop. I could probably blame my parents for letting me watch Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, and Turner & Hooch as early as kindergarten, but I’ll blame it on my overactive imagination. Still, that is what I thought policing was all about: running around making snarky remarks, shooting and getting shot often, and generally kicking ass with very few consequences. In the third grade, I even wrote a sprawling cop tale titled LAPD that filled up 78 pages of a spiral notebook and followed the adventures of my adult detective self - the “#2 cop in the world” as I put it so modestly in my story - pursuing a ruthless serial killer named Jason Travers, who, among other things, brutally murdered my character’s longtime girlfriend Kasey Crawford (her name derived from the then hottest model in the world Cindy Crawford whose poster even then I had on my wall - always the lover of women, I was). The story was chock full of inconsequential violence, adult language, and gratuitous nudity - yet, when I showed off my twisted story to my teacher, she only praised me for my motivation, and when I showed my peers, they showered me with enthusiastic praise as well as their own confusion with what they had just read (and why there hadn’t been more Ninja Turtles in it).

It was around the fifth grade that I came to adore the Alien movies and decided that perhaps my future lay in the life of not just a cop, but a space cop. Besides, if Back to the Future II and Blade Runner were any indication, by 2015-19, we would certainly be in space, and if we were in space, then is was unquestionable that space cops would be needed - a priority even.

So then came my fifth grade novel Alien Havoc - my very first typed affair that followed the space cop that was my future self who stumbled across an alien ship chock full of aliens completely ripped off from the world of Ellen Ripley (with a touch of influence from the 1995 arguable soft-core porno Species, which I somehow convinced my mother to let me rent on VHS after riding my bicycle 8 miles to the nearest movie store and having the clerk call home asking for permission - “Yeah, mom, it’s sort of like Aliens only newer”). My new novel, I felt at the time, was my magnum opus, a brilliantly crafted examination of not only my character, but also the thoughts of the queen alien as well, bouncing back and forth in a third person narrative between our two characters.

It was fucking terrible.

But hell, what eleven year old didn’t imagine a life of glory, of traveling in space and fighting aliens, of getting the girl after a few potentially mortal wounds. Naturally, this desire would stick with me, even as I shed the silliness of my childhood and replaced it with the silliness of my teenage years. I expected, as a graduating senior in high school, to still go into the field.

But I had no idea. I wondered, at age eighteen, if being a cop was reasonable. I had no idea. I applied everywhere for every program that I could imagine exciting. I applied and was accepted to Embry-Riddle for the Aeronautical Science program to be a pilot, California State Long Beach for Film and Video Production to become a filmmaker, Cornell for English to become the writer, UPenn for political science to become to youngest president, John Jay in NYC for criminal justice to become a cop - in other words, I was 18 years old and had no goddamn clue what I wanted to do, except that I wanted to do everything. I had big plans even if I hadn’t yet made them. Eventually, I left my small town in Pennsylvania, my country boy upbringing, to pursue a dual major in criminology and sociology at Florida Southern College, a small college situated between Orlando and Tampa Bay that forced me to go to a Sunday church service twice a semester (I skipped once and they knew… goddammit, they knew). With this degree, my hopes of a crime fighting related future were still intact and I had visions of working for the DEA, maybe, just maybe even the CIA if I could con my way into it - that is before after a few semesters I transferred back to a crummy ol’ state college back home in PA leaving behind my life of year-round tans and bleached blondes in hopes of securing the high school sweetheart and in turn completely altering my major to the education field, which she was also in at her own school. We’d be two peas in a pod, two teachers, sharing vacations, sharing stories - how sweet, I had thought at the time.

It was a strange, strange turn of events for a young man who had once said as a teenager: “I will never ever be a teacher. Too predictable of a life.” Ask the eleven year old me if I would be in my mid-twenties and back in the area that I grew up back in a rural school, and that eleven year old me would only laugh. “No,” he would say, “If I’m not in space at that point then it’s only because I’m dead.” Well, I’m alive. And I’m not in space. Yet.

Sometimes you just have to know when to throw away an old pair of shoes.

I credit the strength of my immune system to having a sewer plant operator for a father and a dairy farmer for a grandfather. Being constantly exposed to shit as a child has crafted an immune system almost superhuman in battling viruses and bacterial infections - of this I am convinced.

Yet, when I do get sick, it always seems to happen when I have time to relax or am on a break from work (or, in the past, school). So, here I am during my week off, sitting in my robe at 3 PM, eating scrambled eggs, blowing my nose, coughing up a lung, and watching Who Framed Roger Rabbit? on television.

I feel like I am twelve years old.