My Seasonal Depression

I’m going through a hard time right now. It’s a kind of seasonal depression I have experienced in recent years around this time, the start of the school year. It’s not the classes that cause it, though. It’s something else. Something much darker and more sinister. Something that every year descends upon the quite, peaceful town of Charlottesville, Virginia where I live.

It’s the undergraduates.

Charlottesville is such a wonderful place during the Summer (and also during the Winter Holiday). It is not a big city, but there is plenty to do: beautiful country on all sides for hiking and taking in scenic views, an obscene number of good restaurants per capita, etc. A small yet cosmopolitan town. But every August when the students come back the serenity of the place is shattered as it instantly becomes noisier, dirtier (as in litter, ie solo cups, and beer cans), and more crowded.

I know what you are thinking. And yes, I was once – and relatively recently – an undergraduate student. How can I hold so much contempt for that segment of society that I, myself, belonged to not long ago?

It’s easy. First of all, like all old people before me, I maintain that I was never like these students. They are different. For some mysterious reason, they are smaller and look younger than I did at their age. Don’t object! It’s true, I swear!

They flaunt their care-free attitude and sense of entitlement wherever they go. It’s as if someone once told them, “The world is your oyster. Just go out and reap all the benefits that are coming to you!”

Well listen here, undergraduates: the world is not your oyster; it’s our oyster! It belongs to those of us that came before you, and what’s more, it’s a hard oyster (to continue the world-as-oyster metaphor). If you want a piece of it, you better start working for it and taking on some responsibility!

But it is hard for them to comprehend this when they are so busy texting on their cell phones and listening to their iPods. And they are always listening to their iPods. Walking around. Sitting on the bus. Running errands. All while listening to their iPods. And, let me tell you, that music is loud. Enjoy your hearing while it lasts, little ones. 

Deafness will probably set in around the same time as the nerve damage in their hands from all of the texting they do. Have you ever talked to one of these young people of today and right in the middle of the conversation they whip our their phone and start texting away? And they do it over and over again? I have. It’s quite possibly the rudest, most annoying thing ever.

This habitual texting was probably the first thing I recognized in younger people that really made me feel like I was looking at an entirely different generation of people.

Now, I realize that I am only a graduate student and those of you out there who work in the real world are shaking your head at me, because as a graduate student I am barely removed from these whom I look down upon.

True as that may be, being in graduate school isn’t the same. And besides, like I said before, I was never like these people. Seriously.