This is the first entry of more that will chronicle a Californian summer and a Grecian autumn with a series of entries far more frequent than this blog or blogger are accustomed to.

I was anxiously itching with the corpse-worms of Marx himself to arrive home from college, start working a full-time job, and ceaselessly criticize my lot in life from June to August as a mindless drone, alienated from his labor. The fifteen dollars an hour I would be raking in as a neophyte in Stanford University’s Electrical Engineering department would be the price of my soul, and my exploitation at the hands of the institution would be so complete that I would be indistinguishable from the slum-chained factory workers of 19^th century England, a cog in the viciously unregulated capitalist machine that was sure to shake itself apart with the resounding suffering that fueled it. I would live to work and work to live, until the revolution came. Then I would go to Greece and live a free and riotous life in the Polytechnic.

What occurred to me upon reaching home and the Protestants’ panacea of full-time work was that it was my collegiate existence that matched up with the doldrums of unrewarding labor and the eternal recurrence of the same. It wasn’t the academic work of the College, either; it was the recreational habits that I partook in or was acclimated to by their droll constancy.

In fewer words, why do college students drink so much? Why do they smoke so many cigarettes, and so much weed? Why so many mushrooms, and why so much dropped acid? Why so many lazy or stoned afternoons wasted away with video games and late nights spent blearily considering a dreary menagerie of movies to forestall that iota of work expected of us? I’m not saying it’s wrong or that no one should indulge in such things; nothing is wrong and no one can rightfully control another. But how often do all of those college students think about the frequency, the quantity, and to what end all of this effort and expenditure and hungover Monday morning classes is directed towards?

That isn’t to say I’m not surrounded by exactly what I expected as a newly inducted white-collar commuter. “Captain” drinks a Heineken on the train back from a Giants’ game. He studied bioengineering in school, and has always wanted to be a sociologist; “things just never came together” for him.

A train hits a car and everyone’s first concern is how their commute is going to be affected. The next day, I hear from a ticket checker that the driver was an illegal immigrant. He jokes that he wishes the alien was killed, but he’s not really joking. Then he checks my ticket and throws me out because I had bought a discounted ticket when I didn’t deserve one.

Are you trying to steal from me? he says and I tell him No, not from you. But he thinks that his his well-being and Caltrain's well-being are one in the same, as if hassling enough shifty-looking college students for filching the system with discounted tickets will raise a taxpayer funded public transportation service that probably hasn't turned a penny of profit in its entire existence enough money to give him a raise in turn, as if making money for a company is the same as making money for himself, making money to continue to provide for himself so that he might live to serve the thing that takes his life from him.

But who am I but a bored college student reading too much into the lives of the phantasmal creatures I share a worm-eating early morning existence with? I already pay so little attention to the world around me I have walked into a pole and gashed my brow. Alas.