Please Attend My Post Grad Depression Party
art: susan lichtman
Dear Readers,
It is with a heavy heart that I invite you all to my Post-Grad Depression Party. The reason why my heart is so heavy is because every morning I eat a bowl of salt. Also, I am not looking forward to graduating and facing whatever comes after. (Doing my own taxes? Eczema? I don’t know, I’m scared!) You might be wondering why I am inviting you to my Post-Grad Depression Party right now when everyone knows that graduations occur later in the spring to make room for enough desperate people to work for unpaid internships all summer. This early invitation is being given because I need to add “event planner” to my resume today. I am applying to Chuck E Cheese and I need them to know that I am so worth it.
Friends, family, classmates. Even your mom is invited to my basement this June. Haha. Yes, my basement. Technically my parent’s basement. That is where I will be hosting my function because I’d like to get used to the place where I’ll be living for the next three years. My goals are as follows. Year One: Buy A Microwave. Year Two: Figure out what “networking” is. Year Three: Carry out a coup d'état. I’m the one that deserves this Chuck E Cheese franchise. Not Gary. Get lost, Gary!
I would like everyone to play some party games. I have already started making some of my own. “How Much Freelance Can I Do To Live?” is a game in which guests pick index cards with different freelance job titles, and then find out how many they need to “Make Rent”. By the way, the salary for most of these is the deliciously useless payment of “exposure”. “Should I Get An MFA In Creative Writing?” is a game where guests smoke weed and stare at a copy of Infinite Jest for forty-five minutes. And of course, Monopoly. Let us at least pretend that we will be able to own property someday.
Entertainment for the evening includes spoken word poetry from a woman who graduated last spring and has been dying her hair and putting “wanderlust” in her social media bios ever since. Andrew from my anthropology class says he will be my musician for the evening, giving us all a taste of what he says is “mumble rap that will define a generation, about a young kid growing up in the suburbs of Connecticut.” Performances also involve interns simply crying on stage.
Finally, we will end the night with a mandatory, god-awful slideshow. I want everyone to see photographic evidence of how I have spent the last four years in the lush campus of sidewalks and security guards at my public college. Pictures of me sitting in the cafeteria, throwing up from the scents of six-day-old pizza and the gross children from the high school next door, who were for some reason allowed to infiltrate our higher education institution. Me, getting stung by a bee. Me, completely plastered after finals, sitting on the steps of the Architecture Building with my face like this: O__o. My friends, searching for quarters in the library so they could buy a cup of coffee with almond milk. I believe the pictures that say the most about the nature of human beings are the ones of everyone’s face right after they leave the financial aid office.
I hope you all come to my party. It would be a pleasure to have you there. Not only because that raises the chances of filling up my “Metrocard Donations” jar at the door, but because I really need some references for my Chuck E Cheese application and I was hoping I could list some of your phone numbers. See you in the spring.
Sincerely,
Afsana Ahmed