Celeberate!

The other day I was typing an email at my internship, and I accidentally wrote that we were going to "celeberate Mother's Day!" Freudian slip?

Everybody who knows me fairly well knows that my personality is a weird mix of childlike joy about the world and extreme cynicism, and I feel like celeberating is a good description of the way I often speak about certain topics. When I think about it, I'm kind of surprised that the word "celeberate" doesn't already exist. I just submitted it to Urban Dictionary, and if all goes well it will be as popular as "frenemy" in the near future (what I really need to do is use it in a screenplay and then get that screenplay produced).

One entity which I find myself simultaneously celebrating and berating all the time is the United States of America. Lately my poor roommate has been subjected to hearing me ask a slew of rhetorical questions beginning with, "How can we reconcile...?" The "we" is almost always non-white people, and when I say non-white I basically mean everybody who didn't come here on the Mayflower or from an affluent Western European country. Because when you think about it, Irish people and Jews are techincally Caucasian but we got a lot of shit (and in some cases, still do) from America when we first got here. Occasionally I am enthused about America, but more often than not I want to talk smack. Even when I'm saying good things about America, I'm usually not 100% pleased. For example, "The great thing about America is that everybody's free to pursue their dreams...in theory." That's celeberating the USA!

Other things that I love to celeberate: religion, the film industry, USC, my friends and family. Sorry losers! You know I love you. And you know I celeberate myself all the time.

Another "institution" which I can't help but celeberate--because I really am not sure how to feel-- is the male/female practice of courting/relationships. Sometimes I think, "Oh, I can't wait to have a special man to share my whole life with!" and other times I think, "Someday soon I'm going to get married and spend the rest of my life compromising my goals and dreams and being stuck in one place (unless we're rich and can afford multiple homes)." Last night I was having this very discussion with my friend Brennero, and he was jokingly referring to having kids as "popping out some anchors." Every year all of this "some day I'll be an adult with a 'real life'" stuff is getting closer and closer, and the prospect of jumping into that life is half wonderful, half horrifying. Suddenly a lot of people I know are engaged or married, and I'm thinking, "Whoa, whoa!" (that makes me think of horses). Right now it's scary enough going forward into life as an independent person (as opposed to being a dependent--I am really going to miss being on my parents' insurance policies).

My whole life right now feels overshadowed by the fact that a little over a month from now I will graduate from college. That means that I will lose my housing and my university job, my friend-base will scatter, and I ought to have lots of creative work ready to show to people. Luckily almost all of my film friends are in the same boat of not having a job lined up (film jobs usually need to be filled immediately, so we can't really get them until classes end). As much as I'm excited to go out into the world (and getting kind of jaded about university life), I feel like my identity is being stolen. I'm going to miss being able to go to cheap arts events on campus, walking past the music school and hearing opera singing echo mysteriously around me, running into friends everywhere, always being able to stop by the sound department and see a friendly face, etc.

Oh well. People graduate from college every year, and most of them turn out okay.

Let's have a celeberation!