I had a lot of fun in college.

It wasn’t so much the drinking, the partying, the first taste of freedom, or the drug experimentation-not that those were unappreciated.

It was the peace of mind.

From the day the big acceptance letter came in the mail, I felt set. I had truly earned something. Now my days of working toward truly earning anything would be over.

Graduating from college isn’t a challenge. You just have to pass. And unless you’re a square and study engineering or something, it’s hard not to pass. I chose my degree based on the ideal ratio between scholarly prestige and lack of mandatory lecture attendance. I had my life planned out, and a top university pedigree was all I needed to set it into motion.

I’d be sort of like the bourgeois bohemian David Brooks wrote about ten years ago-except I’d be younger and cooler. I was just going to be a comfortable bohemian. And I was going to live happily and alternatively ever after.

In case there’s any confusion about what I mean by “comfortable bohemian,” let’s start with what I don’t mean: a bohemian in the original sense. That’s someone in the creative class who lives with total disregard for society’s norms. It’s sexy. It’s a Hunter S. Thompson type of lifestyle. But living like a true bohemian almost guarantees a life of poverty and hardship. And that sucks.

Comfortable bohemians, on the other hand, gripe about the death of old-fashioned bookstores while relying on our iPhones to find quaint new spots to take their place. We read our local alternative weekly, pushed by the national alternative weekly syndicate, to tell us what alternative concerts to see. We’re tired of the commercialization of American sports, so we watch European soccer, fed live by ESPN and Fox Sports at 11 a.m. We shop at Trader Joe’s and try to get to the farmers market when it’s nice out. We’re alternative. But not that alternative.

In the arena of life, we occupy the peanut gallery. We get to take in the show, but we don’t jump in ourselves. We don’t necessarily strive for material affluence, but we compensate for economic inferiority with cerebral superiority.

It’s a lifestyle with its hypocrisies, sure, but that doesn’t make it unrespectable. (Hypocrisy and respectability actually marry quite nicely.) I have no trouble finding the absurdities in our society, but I’m not about to devote my life to railing against the status quo and dwelling on the fringes. I’ve dabbled with poverty enough to know it’s not for me. But I still carry a little shred of conscience. So I’m willing, as a card-carrying comfortable bohemian, to maintain an attitude of respectful dissent, as long as it doesn’t exile me from polite society.

If the point of going to college is to prepare yourself for your future career, I can without boasting say I succeeded in my preparation for comfortable bohemianism. I studied political theory. I read my Lenin and Lukács and Foucault.

Of course, if I’d been looking around more, I might have realized a lot of my peers were, just like me, paving their way toward lives of comfortable bohemianism.

And it might have worked out for us.

Unfortunately, we’ve found ourselves thrust into the worst economy since the Great Depression. And all those squares we laughed at for joining student business groups and going to speed-networking sessions are the only ones with decent jobs. And we live with our parents.

No, things aren’t going as planned. Let’s be clear: the first rule of comfortable bohemianism is comfort. You find your golden cow, whether it’s a job that “harnesses your creativity” or a fat inheritance. And then you layer on tasteful bohemian accents to a degree that’s commensurate with your income. The greater the income, the more bohemian accents you’ll require in compensation.

But without any income, what can we be? Certainly not comfortable bohemians. But we can’t be uncomfortable bohemians, either. We’ve been taught to depend on material abundance. Even those with much more bohemian resolve are weighed down by student debt they can’t ever shake.

And so we are floundering.

To make it worse, pundits have taken to kicking us while we’re down, offering up diagnoses for our problems: We’ve been coddled. Facebook has turned us into social retards. (This is coming from the generation that needs Match.com to get laid.) We’re indifferent to becoming useful members of society.

In some ways, they’re not entirely wrong. Contributing to society isn’t something that feels like an especially noble calling right now. This is a society with its priorities out of whack. This society told me I needed a university education to avoid becoming desperately poor-and then buried me with debt when I followed its directions. (Just going to UC Berkeley, a public university, left me with $80,000 in student debt-and that makes me one of the luckier ones.)

Now, I know my gripe is in some ways predictable. It’s the natural order of history that every generation gets into a fight with its predecessors. Still, it’s pretty rich to be taking a lashing from the generations that gorged themselves on credit and sent the whole system crashing down, all the while rearing us on Playstations and designer handbags and convincing us that it was possible to live comfortably off of a liberal arts education.

I think my generation would garner more respect from our elders if we tried to stand for something more substantial. We could show even slight concern about our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya (or is that last one over?). We could cause even a slight uproar in response to the California college tuition hikes. We could-I don’t know-ask to audit the Fed, or something. Instead, the biggest political groundswell I’ve seen from my generation was a not-very-taxing effort to elect our slightly left-of-center President Obama. And I suspect even that was fueled mainly by clever Facebook marketing and a Shepard Fairey portrait.

Perhaps my generation could have had a watershed moment if the London rioters had actually protested the killing of their disenfranchised peer instead of looting sneakers and computers. But we are the youth of today, and today very few of us would allow principles to distract us from a free shopping spree.

So maybe we should just become real bohemians. Jack Kerouac set out on the road with nothing but a notebook and a beat-up Chevy, and that worked out pretty well for him. Then again, would he have been so eager if he’d had a monthly iPhone bill to think about?

Calvin Alvarez is from Los Angeles.

*Photo courtesy of reidmasimore.

The post Hey, Who Stole My Comfortable Bohemian Future? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I receive high praise from others whenever I mention my commute. I hear how honorable and selfless I am. People tell me they couldn’t last a week making my commute. I’ve learned to respond to such comments with a courteous smile and a slight blush. Not because I’m embarrassed, but because that’s how I figure an honorable and selfless person would react.

The reality is that I can’t stand taking the bus every day. Because taking the bus through southeastern Los Angeles completely blows.

After my car was impounded five months ago, I was intrigued by the prospect of riding the bus. I wanted to save money on gas and parking. I was proud of my reduced environmental footprint. And I was relishing my rogue status in a land of automotive dependency.

Then I rode on the bus for five months.

Five months.

Five months of waiting for delayed buses. Five months of teeth-rattling starts and stops on crumbling roads. Five months of confounding trivia questions on the bus system’s TransitTV (my personal favorite: “Chores are a form of physical activity: true or false?”). After all of it, the novelty of the bus was gone. So were my ideals.

If given the choice, I would rather drive to work in a vehicle powered by incinerated bald eagles than step on another bus in Los Angeles.

In a heartbeat.

But I learned there may be hope for me yet.

The Los Angeles City Council recently passed an anti-harassment ordinance that prohibits motorists from assaulting, threatening, or distracting bicyclists. When motorists do any of these things, bicyclists are to be awarded a minimum of $1,000. Damages are tripled if any are proven. Calling the new law ground-breaking would be an understatement. Los Angeles now has the most stringent legal protection for bicyclists anywhere in the country.

I’ve had two major problems with bicycle riding as a form of daily transportation. The first was the prolonged physical exertion. The second was the helplessness of sitting on a tiny aluminum frame on streets dominated by masses of fast-moving, heavy steel. This second fear has been fueled by the horror stories I hear from the bike couriers I talk to in the freight elevators I ride at work. The brake checks, swinging car doors, and homophobic jeers they talk about wouldn’t be good additions to my daily routine. But what if this new law could mitigate those threats?

It might. The law, with its vague language and large payouts for bicyclists, should give motorists second, and third, thoughts. A bicyclist who wins a legal challenge would win not only damages, but also legal fees. Winning drivers receive no such recompense for their fees. The law does little to define what constitutes improper behavior by a motorist, and bicyclists don’t have to prove any damages to win. So it’s not difficult to imagine charges filling the mailboxes of unsuspecting drivers, who will have little choice but to settle out of court.

To tell the truth, it’s that prospect that piqued my personal interest in bike riding more than anything. Crippling student loans and my frustrating inability to drive have created in me a vile jealousy of motorists that is downright shameful. I’d be embarrassed to relate the sinister thoughts that pop into my head every time I catch a glimpse of a passing BMW.

But the way I see it, this new law gives an unheard-of amount of leverage to the underclass of bike riders. David has traded in his sling for an automatic rifle, and that’s an ideal and mentality I could see adopting. So I hopped in the saddle of my uncle’s 24-speed and took to the road to see if having the law on my side gave me any sliver of confidence.

The route I took to work ran down Telegraph Road into East Los Angeles, followed Olympic through Boyle Heights, crossed into downtown on the 7th Street bridge, and ended after a quick jaunt through Skid Row.
But the majority of my trip was down Telegraph Road.

Telegraph, running alongside the heavily congested I-5 freeway, is the alternative rush-hour route for the foolishly impatient. Three lanes wide and bisected by intersections every quarter-mile or so, Telegraph feels less like a suburban thoroughfare and more like a long succession of drag strips. The 5 and its traffic flow are always in plain sight, and for drivers to receive any satisfaction for their alternate-route smarts, they have to gun the throttle in between stoplights to make up for the time lost sitting at red lights.

The road is backwards. Cars move more slowly in the crowded left lanes, pushing faster traffic to the far right, where I was riding. This kept my adrenaline pumping. I endured a couple shouts of “Get the fuck on the sidewalk!” (Sadly, I wasn’t able to catch up and prompt a threat by asking, “Or what?”) Otherwise, my commute was uneventful.

When one of my coworkers asked me if I felt like a “true cyclist” after I successfully biked down such busy streets and held my own, I told him I was too busy focusing on staying as close to the curb as possible to feel anything. And, really, that’s just the simple truth of road dynamics for bicyclists on a busy street. While I was taking painstaking care to stay in the street gutter the whole ride for fear of breaking my neck, most cars zooming past me didn’t think twice about coming within inches as they passed. That’s the level of comfort a steel frame provides.

I’d have to receive a hell of a lot more than three times my damages to feel the same level of comfort on a bike.

There’s been lots of talk lately of a cultural war between motorists and cyclists. This presumes that every cyclist carries an anarchistic bent, seeking to sabotage drivers by running red lights and veering too far to the left, and that every motorist sees red when their path is obstructed for a few fractions of a second.

It’s not like that on Telegraph Road. Cars and bikes are in a contest not because they are different, but because they share the same problem: neither has enough room to maneuver. What’s needed is more space, not more law.

Calvin Alvarez is an intern at Zócalo Public Square (and doesn’t really endorse the burning of bald eagles).

*Photo courtesy of waltarrrrr.

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