meta-upchuck: leaning in

It is exceedingly frustrating to be in a conversation with a bunch of privileged, well-educated but under-experienced young (college) people about things that we've only theorized about in classrooms and read about in our New York Times articles, about worlds we haven't experienced, people we don't know how to empathize with, criticizing criticisms and throwing out - throwing up - theories that have been shallowly crammed into only the thin-aired layers of our uppermost brain stratospheres. No one knows how to answer anything except in more questions, in more tangential quips about some new detail they can bring to the blabber, in a yet louder voice, source: yet another TedTalk that we only used half of our hearts to concertedly browse through.

In short, it is exceedingly frustrating to be in conversations with a bunch of [me]s. Solipsistic and hamster-wheeling our way into the most civilized kind of arguments about Big Problems Plaguing Our World Today [AS NEVER BEFOOOREEE!!], mind-numbingly unproductive,  rankly stagnant in our game of selfjustification-sophistication. Sometimes it feels like some sort of manic speed and endurance game, where everyone in the circle has to say at least one thing before the whole group goes around once, and you'll compete for that golden spotlight - at once glorious and terrifying - before and after which nothing matters. Other than those isolated moments of self-sparkle, you listen. Or not.

In these maddening moments of the sick circle game we play in all our liberal arts tragi-comedic glamour, sometimes I get the urge to block up my ears with my fists (ineffective, I know, but it's a part of the whole unfortunate scheme) and run around the room, yelling AHHH, full-on first grade. It is my daydream that someday, someone [me!?] will join in, and we will begin an impromptu game of duck-duck-goose -- finally rendering some meaning and humanity and real-life progress back into that holy circle of trust, intellectual stimulation, and forward-thinking maturation into which I leeeeeean, too often these days, as a fourth year undergraduate kid who knows nothing about everything, as fickle as a sunny, sandwichy day, complete with storm clouds of banality brewing, imminent and menacing in the lurky canvas corners of Normal Life.