A Confusing Quarter Life Crisis: Generational Pass Up.

Today was super confusing. I had a non traditional student come into my office today with a roommate issue. By that I mean she was a twenty three year old graduate student, with an internship at our student union department, lived on campus and was an international student from Switzerland. I believe quarter life starts differently and at widely varying times in a young person’s life. By the math, this young lady was definitely in the ¼ category and thus fair game for me to comment on. But, it was the uber Millennial aspects of her personality which made me think I was seeing the next wave of quarter lifers, the next generation, that I might be heading quickly into a new demographic category and no one has come up with a new name for these kids punching out of our grand matriculating college apparatus.

But at the beginning of the meeting, no big whoop. Just another cog in the diverse student body machine of campus. And probably her roomie issue was going to be in the well worn categories of bills, lifestyles, behavior conflicts, levels of slobby or INFP personality types from the Myers Briggs tests.

I was happily wrong, but terribly perplexed after our discussion and my attempts to help her with her unique situation. It left me wondering, pondering many questions about life, good versus evil, is there a God, and is there already a generation gap, stimulus packages and how I could somehow flesh out a small off Broadway script from our hour long meeting.

And hopefully by blogging this out, I might help you the reader. And I might contribute in some small way to the betterment of mankind and finally to remove the nagging mental tumor of our encounter from a rapidly degrading mental state of my professional and personal mind.

So here we go.

Well, my appointment did eventually make it in, wet hair and frumpled clothes not withstanding on her sleep deprived, unkempt, inked up, iPod budded ears and some sort of Asiatic language tattoo print on her nicotine stained left finger. As I like to ice breaker as soon as I can, and just got the ear phones ejected from her ears, I asked about the finger tattoo. She told me it was tribal.

Oh, I love that one. I get this tribal thing all the time. Your last name is Johnson sweetie and the last tribe you were in was sometime around 200 AD in some Anglo-Saxon wave into Britain. Plus it is in Japanese and was probably inked by a Honduran guy who could not even speak English. But, in her defense I was also told it meant peace in mind. I took it’s garbled print’s advice and Zen’d myself for the issues ahead.

Okay, outside of her apparent trust in late night body painting, her reason for visiting me. This one was about a relationship problem with the roomie and the infamous third roommate or in other words, the shacking boyfriend.

Here is the simple exchange.

“Cathy, thanks for coming in. I hope we can help ya out. Tell me what’s going on.”

“My roommate and I are not speaking because of a big argument over my boy friend sleeping over some nights during the week. It’s not like we’re bugging her. We’re quiet and he is usually gone before she even wakes up. Her big hang up is like that my guy…ummm, like we’re sleeping together…she thinks, like I am a whore. I mean like I’m a good girl, I don’t sleep a around. She and I are even in College Sister’s for Christ and she is like, ummm spreading around rumors that I am not a virgin. I am.”

Okay. Me likey this. Sounds interesting. Sounds like a few standard responses of diversity, respect, a counseling appointment, maybe some mediation or in the end a new roommate assignment might be in order. Been down this track many a time. I could handle this.

Then she hit me. “I am still a virgin. My boyfriend and I only have anal sex because we are saving each other for marriage.

My mind did a needle scrape across the cliché record. “Anal sex?” I was barely listening to her story which was the same one I had heard a thousand times before in the roommate genre, but when the term anal came up, followed by sex…and when put in conjunction with the fact that his little coed still believed she was a virgin. Wow!

She began to boo hoo a bit and I handed her a tissue from our large supply of boxes of Kleenex. From there out, I did not recall much of what she said, but I doled out some advice about respecting privacy and belief structures. Then there was the standard comfort zone speech. I am pretty sure she got the drift that if you want peace in your abode, you have to have it with your partner and for now she lives with one person and that’s the gal you need to make happy. If you need to shack…stay at the boyfriend’s. Not sure I helped. Not sure I could.

The main thing I wanted to concentrate on after she left was a puzzling question. Anal sex = virginity? Somehow this fellow of hers had the creative salesmanship to be able to convince her that taking one up the butt was still considered non-sex. What a slick willy…no pun intended. This guy could possibly run for President some day. Absolutely, fascinating.

What I am getting at here is the idea, we might be seeing the defining aspect of the next generation. That the quarter lifers are coming to a new era. That those of us in such, might be leaving early into a thirties-something era not by right of age, but by the difference of behavior and belief. I think the chief word for the new twenty-somethings is gullibility.

The new ladies and gents coming out and up will do anything, fall for anything and never have any idea as to why they did it, what cause they did or did not support, what they believe in and why so?

Maybe I am just bitching here, but wow. I am certainly not old enough to be griping about young people, to be shaking my fist and chatting about the good ol days, but be on the look out. These kids are coming and you might just see your quarter lifer personality acting more like your parents way sooner than you thought.