The Antonymous Relationship of Hapless and Hopeless

I woke up on New Year's Day and promptly went back to sleep. When I got up a second time though, it was about 11am and I felt different. I know people generally don't feel different when they are 22 years 364 days old as apposed to when they are 23, and I know that New Year's Eve and New Years Day ought to feel just about the same, but this year it didn't.

I don't know if there was hope brewing in me, or if I had just enjoyed my hotel room, but I felt different walking around Baltimore on New Year's Day. And then I realized that it was 1 and Alex Pyzik had been sitting in a couch watching sports for two hours. He was competing in the ESPNZone Couch Potato Competition. All he had to do was sit in a chair and watch sports longer than three other individuals and he would win a gluttony of prizes.

Since we've graduated, and I mean a collective 'we', I know only two people that like what they do for a living. Others are fine doing what they are doing but want to move on. They are suffering through their jobs in order to get better ones, or to get grad school paid for. Those of us without real jobs are scrapping by, substitute teaching, working at bars, doing what we can to last out this economy.

But as I enter my fourth month of job hunting I realize that their is little hope. Not much has changed, there still aren't a lot of jobs to be had. Some of my friends are giving up and going back to school.

But as Pyzik was sitting there in that chair, he was sitting there with a part of me. He was the part of me that didn't need a job, didn't need a different way to validate myself, just needed to sit in a chair and watch sports to be famous.

I was rooting for him, but as you can probably guess it's hard to root for a guy sitting in a chair. It's not like rooting for any sports team or person that you can imagine. I couldn't watch him, I couldn't tune into SportsCenter for my 11 pm update. But I could get text messages.

So on the night of the first I went home and recovered from the previous evening. It was around 11 when I got the text that Pyzik was still going. My symbol of hope had lasted 12 hours in the chair so far. He was showing the type of resilience that I would need for the next few months to find a job.

On the night of the second I went to visit my girlfriend and then went out. Pyzik was still sitting in that chair. The next night I went to a birthday party for one of my lovely ladies, and Pyzik was still sitting in that chair. It was two in the morning, and I got the message that he was five hours away from the world record.

That was my boy, five hours from the world record. Five hours later he would set it and win the championship. After that he was hopeless again, Pyzik is a Religious Studies Major, and other than his current job has nothing in the horizon. He jumped back into the big pot with the rest of us. But in the mean time he was a hero.

Which brings me to my original thesis. We as a generation are hopeless, but we are not hapless. We have ability, we just need a job, a way to prove ourselves. We are qualified, if not over qualified for most jobs, but those jobs don't exist. We are not lucky, we are not betting on ourselves. We know the truth, we know the situation, but we don't care.

Pyzik was us, protesting. He didn't need a job for those almost three full days in a chair. He was doing what God put him on this earth to do, and that was all that any of us could hope for. We hope for job's that we like, that we were meant to do. We romanticize a job market which only seems to hold nothing, or at least nothing that we will enjoy. Nothing that we were meant to do.

Ten years ago in our position we would have been hapless. We would only have ourselves to blame for being in the position we are. Today however, we are sitting on our chairs, watching sports (the Fiesta Bowl as I type), and hoping that when we get out after sitting here for a world record time, that hopefully our new year will have us feeling more hopeful and less hapless.

Happy New Year everyone. Keep on sitting.