My mythical friend Jack

Jack walked into my room looking tired. He placed a bottle of Black Label on my desk and filled two glasses with ice from the fridge without asking if I intended to drink at 11 o'clock on a Wednesday night. After pouring hefty glasses for the both of us, he sat down, and we began to chat.

Smalltalk and the effects of the Scotch propelled Jack to begin to open up after a few minutes. "I've been in some kind of funk the past month or so — I don't understand. I don't go to class. I don't do any work. I just sit around. My grades are good, and my classes are theoretically interesting, so where did my motivation go? And then I feel guilty about having accomplished nothing that day, so the whole thing compounds itself, making me even angrier and less willing to do work."

Many of our friends weren't of much help, since they'd been acting weird themselves lately. Jack had to intervene one night at dinner when two close friends almost physically fought over the fact that one was flicking niblets of corn at the other, something totally out of character. What had gotten into them, and why did Jack repeatedly have to intervene just to keep World War Three from erupting in the Pyne common room?

"Oh, but there's news," he said, snapping me back to reality. Jack said that his girlfriend had just gotten her dream job — Peace Corps. Twenty-seven months doing lord-knows-what in the badlands of sub-Saharan Africa. Still, it was what she wanted.

"Isn't that good news?" I asked. Jack grunted and swirled the ice cubes around the bottom of his glass. Suddenly, it became clear.

"Is the distance thing going to make it hard for you guys?" Jack looked at me, and with a sense of resignation, he shot back, "Not so much hard as over." For almost three years they had been together, and I had naively assumed that they'd be getting married.

Trying to move to a better area, I inquired about the thesis. The floodgates opened. After six months in the lab, he finally had something that he could turn into a good paper (which apparently isn't always the case), but the writing wasn't going as well as he would have hoped.

"It's a daily struggle, and my advisor's making things harder instead of easier. I walk in, and she rips my chapters apart. She can't tell me why they're bad, just that they are and that I'd better 'get serious' if I plan to do well in med school. Get serious? Is she kidding me? Does she think I'm not trying? I'm at the point where I don't even bother to send things in anymore — I mean, what's the point?"

The emotions began to flow like the golden alcohol in his glass. "I'm at the top of the Chemistry department, and she's insulting my basic capability to do lab work? Three and a half years of chem courses and I apparently don't have the skills to write a decent thesis. What will I do next year ... what if I can't hack Stanford?" I wondered if his advisor realized how destructive her words were.

"I don't know where to turn anymore ... I'm not sure that I even care by this point. Screw what my parents want. I've heard that honors don't really matter anyway."

The irony is that Jack has always been one of the lucky ones. Bright, well-liked and unfailingly polite, he has what my parents call a "good head on his shoulders." He got into what I thought to be a good medical school, although not exactly the one that he wanted. Shouldn't he be on top of the world? Given the trials and tribulations that other people have to deal with, what right did he have to complain? You could tell that he had already thought that one through — and that the answer, or lack thereof, wasn't exactly helping his mental state.

After an hour of listening to him blow off steam, he did the one thing that I hoped that he wouldn't do — he turned the conversation back towards me. I had been nursing my drink, still over three quarters full, hoping that it wouldn't impair my ability to read through half a Pequod before precept the next morning. I made some comment about needing to impress my preceptor the week before the in-class midterm exam, and he understood instantly. Jack got up and went for the door, apologizing repeatedly for what he considered his trivial complaints.

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"Sorry again to bother you," he said. "Looking around, it just seems that everybody else has everything under control ... I just need to figure out why my life is such a mess." Matthew Gold is a politics major from New York, New York. He can be reached at mggold@princeton.edu. His day-today commentary can be found at http://mattggold.blogspot.com.