The question we’ve all been asking ourselves is “will the real world bring bukkake parties!?”
Approaching graduation is a trying time in the life of many seniors. Regardless of how many of us look at it as a time to blow this Wes-popsicle stand and how many others of us look at it is a forlorn, begrudged goodbye, we can’t ignore that looming distant place commonly referred to as the “Real World” (RW).
My annoyance with the phrase RW has increased exponentially since this semester started, exacerbated by family members, friends, and anyone else who categorize our graduation as a movement from the Wesleyan bubble to the RW.
In brief: I hate the phrase Real World. Yes, partly it’s semantic, for isn’t everything real (or if you want a skeptic’s approach, isn’t nothing at all real)? If life at Wes is real or a mirage, then life after Wes will also be real or a mirage. I’m of the everything’s real camp, believing that our relationship to our experiences makes up and is (our) reality—for better or worse, for real or for fake. And yes, partly it’s also due to dread—must we mention the evil?
But aside from the semantic games and fear, I want to address why it’s the metaphor that drives me crazy, too.
I’ve actually been struggling with the concept, the composition of the so-called Real World, trying to uncover the gamut of its semiotic meaning. But at the end of the day, I’ve decided the confusion isn’t my fault—it’s the contradictory way we use it that misleads me, some days linking the RW to a place where we can learn and grow surrounded by important, natural things, and other days attesting that it is a sick, twisted place of horror and tragedy.
The phrase Real World is incredibly classist. Hear me out before you think I’m just being a nincompoop because I think you’ll agree. At Wesleyan we promote this idea of the “bubble”—the land of the free, home of the brave, and all that patriotic jazz of our beloved country, Wesleyan University. Well, like any good patriots we surmise that we live in a perfect world.
The bubble frees us from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Or so I’ve heard from Hamlet.
The key word for me is fortune. Sure, it means fate in this sense, but let me play my word games and also decide that there is a connotation of wealth. At Wesleyan we like to pretend that class doesn’t matter. Wesleyan is a fake world because there is no need or use for money. We don’t think about it because we don’t need it.
Wrong.
Some of us have to think about money, and this isn’t a bubble for us. Sure we all have the same piece of plastic that gives us access to the Campus Center, Mocon, Weshop, among other places, but Wesleyan isn’t a great equalizer (even, if not especially, in a meritocratic sense). Indeed, financial aid covers some of people’s need. However, if you don’t have a job on or off campus and don’t fork over thousands of dollars of your own money to Wesleyan every year, you have to recognize that this might be because you don’t have to. Many of us are spared financial concerns while at Wes, and thus we are allowed to believe that money isn’t an issue.
But what about buying expensive outfits for parties, going out for dinner off campus, taking spring break in a distant country or part of the country? These are expenses that may “come from our own pockets” but why is it that our pockets still have money in them for these things and others don’t? It’s because every dollar we earn doesn’t have to go to our Wes education.
I realize I’ve been using inclusive “we” pronouns this whole time, positioning myself as both the wealthy and as the finaid student. If there were a fence between these two students I might say that I straddle it, but it’s not that simple. My class background is a column unto itself, so let’s just say my divorced family two-household background sets me inside two very distinct classes.
So the Real World is painful and full of pressure and challenges and difficulties. I ask myself as Hamlet did, “Who would fardels bear, to grunt and sweat under a weary life?” So the RW ends up being this pleasant home where we can escape trauma and oppression, or at least we can escape my friends fardeling on my face.
This sentiment seems to predispose us all to think that it’s a place where idealism dies. Once we enter the RW we are forced to overlook and dismiss all our liberal politics and submit to the conservative atmosphere that our country has gotten ensconced in. With this regard liberal currents turn awry and lose the name of action. I think this kind of perspective on life after Wesleyan is not only incredibly sad, I hope and believe that it is patently untrue.
To sleep—perchance to dream. Well, perchance to last more than a month in this RW where I have work from nine to five every day, loans to pay off, friends scattered across the globe, no health insurance, and worst of all where I can’t write columns laden with Hamlet references and not be embarrassed. What a sad world it will be!
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