...and don't panic! The Know brings you advice during housing
A true friend is always there for you, especially when you're drunk.
Miss Quit regresses to her childhood this week as the prospect of beginning the "University of Life" looms.
The current air of third year existence is a heady concoction of anxiety, ambition, and aggravation betwixt the two. Good things may well come to those who wait, but who’s got the will? Where there’s a will there’s a way, but which way is the way to go? These are common quandaries of the soon-to-be (but not soon enough) graduate.
The waiting game is one that, as someone of a rather impatient and excitable nature, I especially despise. Not so much due to the prospect of lapsed time but the suspense it facilitates. Anticipation, my old friend.
I fear I may have done it again: attempted an impossible quit. I seem to be making a habit of it lately. What a masochist. Yet, anticipatory as one may be, there is a pointed difference between types of expectation.
Part of the problem is the confusion over explicit expectation and its less-confident cousin, hope. One may hope where one dares not expect. Let me better explain the kind of expectation I mean by referencing another (in)famous wordsmith: Kanye West.
Never one to go down without voicing his opinion, especially wherever he or his work are concerned, the ‘artist’ (as he prefers to be called, just like another notoriously short and narcissistic musician), slips from the socially-acceptable terrain of sporting hope into the dangerous waters of vociferous expectation with alarming regularity. Especially at award ceremonies.
When expectation turns into an unbelievably egoistic tirade fuelled by an excessively jumped-up sense of personal injustice that sees you storming the stage of the MTV Europe Music Awards and crashing your fellow musicians’ acceptance speech for the prize you failed to win, then it might be time to think about downsizing your self-assuredness. Sometimes even a million dollars and Pamela Anderson can’t prevent disappointment.
I suppose that’s the danger of expecting too much. Failure, the lack of the desired outcome springing from such hopes, can lead to bitterness, or in this case a shockingly childish display of vain resentment.
Yet, it seems that there is something else going on beneath the surface of seeming arrogance here. Unfulfilled expectation, driven by desire, sparks reactions that betray the depths of emotional investment human beings expend in the pursuit of such desperately coveted outcomes. We expect, ultimately, because we care very deeply indeed.
Mr. West’s little tantrum may have been avoidable, however, if only he had heeded that expectation doesn’t always result in its realisation - quite the contrary. The trick is not to be disheartened. Or cause worldwide offence with displays of gross discourtesy and conceit.
With Valentine’s Day (that shameless capitalist institution wrapped up in an emotionally manipulative red bow) within spitting distance, I for one won’t be expecting any love-hearts. Not because I want to avoid throwing a Kanye, but because I prefer to keep the perspective of a William.
So as I await news of my fate beyond undergraduate life (alas, it is admissions season where acceptance and rejection run rife), avoidance of expectation will no doubt continue to challenge me for a good month or so. Ah well, patience is a virtue, and for the less than virtuous there is always gin.
All that we can expect then, I suspect, is to realise the limits of our own expectations, good or bad.
Never one for (much) inconsistency, I shall conclude with reference to a third master of the English language whose title I pinched for my own anticipated ends, the words of which seem perfectly summative of them: I must be taken as I have been made. The success is not mine, the failure is not mine, but the two together make me.
Oh Charlie, who would expect anything less? Take Willie's advice, and all may yet end well.
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