College Is Over--Now What?

Everyone has heard of the post-college slump. Moving back home and holing up like a medieval hermit in the basement of the house you grew up in, dragging your hairy, unwashed, PJ-clad self upstairs only when your parents tell you that if you want to live under their roof again you have to participate in family dinners. Renting an apartment in the cheapest possible neighborhood of the same big city where all of your college friends moved to and spending your days surfing the Craigslist job postings and your nights recreating college life in any of the numerous bars near you where, even though you have been twenty-one for more than a year, you still find it occasionally thrilling that they actually serve you alcohol. Segueing straight from graduation into a plummy job at your dad's company, where the pay is decent, the chances of being fired are nil, and the idea that this could become your life makes you gag. Finally moving in with your college sweetheart, realizing that life in the real world is a lot harder than you expected and that your sweetheart has peculiar personal habits and a disturbing lack of regard for cleanliness, and fighting all the time, and then fighting some more.

Although I've fallen victim to, or come close to succumbing to, the dreaded slump in all of its permutations since I left college, at least I left the country. Post-college slump in Egypt? Never! As malaria has no place in Siberia, so the post-college slump--disease of pampered, commitment-phobic, American upper-middle-class youths--has no place in a third-world Muslim country. Wrong! You can take the American upper-middle-class youths out of America, but you can't save them from the slump. We park ourselves in front of the TV and bemoan our lack of professional direction. We drink too much. We go to stupid parties, pretend to have a good time, and then spend the next day hungover and wondering why all the parties here are lame. We think we are lame, and worry that we are fundamentally lazy, and complain that we are bored. We flirt with members of the opposite sex, enter into casual and unfulfilling relationships with them, and then justify leaving them by saying that by this point in life, you shouldn't date anyone you can never see yourself marrying.

It's Thursday night, the first night of the weekend here in Egypt. Why am I sitting at home contemplating the post-college slump instead of tossing on a cute outfit, having a few drinks with some of my fellow American ex-pats, and hitting the party circuit?

Well actually, if truth be told, I'm just waiting for my ride.