High school love and music are worth reminiscing about

‘ ‘ ‘ There is one remedy for those times when you wake up with no idea what you want, when the… ‘ ‘ ‘ There is one remedy for those times when you wake up with no idea what you want, when the task of organizing your various impulses ‘mdash; of greater and lesser degrees of rashness and inadvisability ‘mdash; seems to be insurmountable: listening to the music you listened to in high school. ‘ ‘ ‘ Solace is always found among the memories of a 16-year-old you shouting Saves the Day lyrics and the fond nostalgia of 11th-grade nights coddling a Discman. Nothing productive is gleaned from such reminiscing, but, nevertheless, you emerge from your Weezer and iTunes coma assured that you’ll figure it out. ‘ ‘ ‘ That was how I spent last Sunday. Unwashed, despondent and bellowing my pop-punk discography, I hardly even watched the Steelers. However, somewhere between the third hour of Taking Back Sunday and furiously rooting through boxes searching for my copy of Through Being Cool, I was struck by the curious question: ‘Why doesn’t any of the music I usually listen to treat emotions like Chris Conley and Co.?’ ‘ ‘ ‘ The answer is because college and adult relationships are nothing like high school. In our mid-teens, starting to date someone was a colossal undertaking and, when we actually asked them out, a sea change took place. Weeks of pomp and nervous courting culminated in a movie date. If we played hallway encounters carefully and fortune’s caprice swung in our favor, a hand-holding might be in order. When we were finally ‘official,’ we had been transformed in some deep and metaphysical fashion. ‘ ‘ ‘ Breaking up was equally awesome. It often involved a team of intermediaries covering the collapse with all the ardor of political punditry. ‘He said what?’ ‘She kissed whom?’ When we became single again, we knew very well that the events that had brought us to this pared-down existence rivaled any decline and fall Edward Gibbon could ever chronicle. Even Nero would have put his fiddle down for this fire. ‘ ‘ ‘ Such epic volatility ended around the start of sophomore year in college. New relationships were no longer marked with all the solemnity of a marriage proposal. Rather, ‘dating’ came to signal some indefinite increase in the frequency and exclusivity of hooking up. Break-ups lost their Homeric splendor and became, instead, slow timelines of attrition. ‘ ‘ ‘ The emotional pitch relaxed from a Wahlberg-ian perfect storm to a Woolf-ian overcast. The music got slower and stakes got lower. ‘ ‘ ‘ Now most people will argue that this was a good shift. As Rainer Maria Rilke once advised a young poet, ‘Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished and still incoherent … ?)’ It is a mark of a heightened maturity, then, that we stop throwing ourselves in and out of love? ‘ ‘ ‘ No. It is a mark of prudence conquering our drive. We discover the lotus flowers of contentment and jaded outlook. Touched with the fear of naivety, we begin to ape the constancy of our elders and settle into years of biding. It is no surprise that most music seems to be incongruent with the college experience. The inertia of pseudo-adulthood would make an awful album. ‘ ‘ ‘ I am not advocating the stupidity of popularity politics or the puppy love of high school. I absolutely respect the committed relationships of my college peers, some of whom are already married. ‘ ‘ ‘ My gripe is with the all-too-familiar retreat into the convenience of college. In our younger years, we saw our significant other a few times a week at most. ‘ ‘ ‘ As our parents cooked our dinners, relationship convenience was little more than an assured mall date every Friday. Now the appeal of a warm bed, a partner sharing dinner duty and the grown-up feeling of habituation is intoxicating. ‘ ‘ ‘ The dangers of such an opiate exceed the usual vague complaints about being true to self. The price of the sobriety of collegiate contentment is a certain prurience, a worrisome appetite. The simple truth is that somewhere in our still-somewhat-bestial minds we crave the tempestuous. ‘ ‘ ‘ If we can’t get the swells and drops of high school love, we have to seek them outside our unions. Such ushers in the age of collegiate cuckolding and brooding resentment. Others just succumb to irony and detachment to forget. ‘The ideal of happy love is childish. The gritty reality is summed up in mediocre affairs.’ ‘ ‘ ‘ It’s time we stopped giving in to this mindset. We can take the lessons learned about ourselves and caring for someone else without abandoning the acuteness of sentiment. Turn back the clocks and get caught up in your passions. Whether through romantic misadventures or through the bipolarity of middling commitments, we are damned to go up and down. ‘ ‘ ‘ We might as well choose the former, put the pop-punk back on and go forth. Sing Erik ‘You Vandal’ at ech15@pitt.edu.