My Incredibly Successful Friends - A Treatise

This is Robert G. Ingersoll, a 19th century orator best known for his quote, "Happiness is the only good." But, I don't know... Does he really look all that happy?

Every so often, I’ll stop whatever I’m doing and start to fantasize about my 10-year high school reunion. I think that the 10-year-reunion was invented by geeks like myself as a means to finally stick it to all the people they hated, to shout, “Haha, Biff Eagleton! Sure, you may have been banging cheerleaders while I was running the Dungeons and Dragons Club, but now I’m a millionaire comic book dealer and you still work at your Dad’s dealership! Suck on that!” What makes this fantasy difficult for me is that it has two phases: 1) Being a geek in high school (Mission Accomplished!) and 2) Actually becoming successful in real life as opposed to just fantasizing about it (Not So Much).

This past weekend, I made the perilous trek to Salem for an informal one-year high school reunion of sorts. This reunion didn’t really satisfy my fantasies, though, because I liked everyone there and didn’t feel a pressing need to rub my meager accomplishments (“You damn bet I’ve got a blog!”) in their faces. In fact, you could almost consider it the antithesis of a standard high school reunion, because most of my friends (who had been considerably more popular and considerably less in the marching band than I was) have done wonderful and life affirming things in the past year that made my life look lame, instead of the other way around. Yes, I know it’s not hard to feel lame when your typical Friday night consists of coming home from work and catching half an episode of What Not To Wear with Mom and Dad, but my friends have done some strikingly awesome stuff.

I think the main lesson I learned from reconnecting with my high school pals is that I screwed up big time by being bad at math and science, because apparently that’s where all the money is these days. One of my friends, a civil engineering major at Oregon State University, is making $15.07 an hour working full time this summer for the Oregon Department of Transportation. And that’s impressive enough on its own, but it turns out that there’s so little work for him to do that he spends roughly half of his time either teaching himself how to play the guitar or catching up on sleep. He gets overtime (which comes to about $22 an hour), he has authority over people more than twice his age, and he gets to drive one of those pickup trucks with a flashing light on top.

It really breaks my heart to write that last part down, that part about the truck with the flashing light on it. You see, most of my idle daydreams somehow involve me being behind the wheel of a car with a flashing light on it, because in my estimate there are few things cooler than driving a vehicle with a doohickey on top that basically says, “Get the fuck out of my way, I’m more important than you”. It’s arguably the only car that accurately conveys my feelings toward the rest of the world without the use of a large billboard. I would pay good money to drive one of those trucks for a day, and here’s one of my friends, a guy I talk to, who’s actually getting paid to drive around in one of those wonderful, wonderful machines for months at a time. He could drive around in his flashing light truck for just a little more than two hours and make more than I do in an entire night of milkshakery at Carl’s. The only way I could stop being seriously green with envy is if it turns out that my friend hates driving the flashing light truck and secretly longs to make milkshakes for cranky retirees. But no, of course, there’s no way that can be the case. The only way the deal could get sweeter for him is if the flashing light truck has a tip jar, and at the rate his luck is going I’m pretty sure it does.

Not present at the party was another one of my scientifically gifted friends, Michael Snively. Now, the very fact that he’s going to MIT is enough to make my college experience pale in comparison, but the reason he wasn’t at the party is because he’s too busy following his dreams by taking part in a competitive summer internship at Hasbro’s world headquarters in Rhode Island. I remind you, I’m making milkshakes at the moment, except when I take a couple days off to pour water instead, and in neither one of my jobs am I making as much as the guy who gets paid to drive around in a flashing light truck, nor am I following any particular dream. Michael Snively, it seems, is seizing his summer – every day he commutes across state lines and does what he’s wanted to do for years, whereas I cut across a middle school soccer field and find new and exciting ways to combine dairy products. Might I add that I’m lactose intolerant.

And then, of course, there were the “Through the grape vine” stories of the other people I’d known in high school. There was The Drama Guy who is currently with a traveling theater troupe somewhere on the East Coast, or The Math Whiz who is being aggressively courted by Ford, or That Girl Who Really Liked Horses who is currently reigning as the Linn County Rodeo Queen. All of these people are my age, and they all just hit the ground running and haven’t looked back. As I play my Xbox 360 and bemoan the gradual descent of my talent as a musician, it’s tough to look at my overtime-earning, dream-chasing, rodeo royalty friends and not feel a bit depressed.

But I keep it in perspective by remembering that, while I may not have a high paying job or rodeo aristocracy (sorry, Nicole, but I’m probably going to make fun of that forever – perhaps until the cows come home, if you know what I’m saying?), I do have one thing in common with the rest of my friends: I, too, am happy. Sure, maybe not when I’m sweating out 100-degree heat and mopping up the kitchen at Bella Fresca, but when I’m hammering away at the blog or writing scripts for campus TV or parading around in a yellow and green jumpsuit in front of thousands of drunk people, I’m about as happy as the proverbial pig in shit, and let me tell you, that’s pretty happy.

I really do hope that I’m successful in life, and making a lot of money would sure be fine too, but in the end, if I can work out an arrangement in which I have consistent happiness for the rest of my days, I think I’ll be in pretty good shape. To quote my friend Alexander (who has been invited to attend West Point, yet another school that is considerably better than the one I’m going to), “Being happy is my favorite.” And, as much as I’d like to have flashy accomplishments and happiness, I suppose just happiness will do in a pinch.

Truman Capps hopes that his very dear friend The Conspiring Leader is catching onto all this “don’t worry, be happy” bullshit – you see, she just recently turned down a job at a large accounting firm when she realized, after two years as an accounting major, that she hates accounting, and is currently under a bit of duress to figure out what she’s going to do with her senior year of college. Truman is sure we can all agree, regardless of what happens next, that she made the right choice. Also, since this stinger hasn’t been all that funny: UNDERPANTS.