i am evidently scoffing at this professional advice, but i'm starting to think that the advice might be apt on a personal level. the clock here being college, and the development being social. i go back and forth on this issue, but right now i feel that i graduated from college without really having developed the social skills to deal with the real world.
they continue to develop, of course, just like everyone's, but college, with its variegated background and inherent nature as a primordial soup of personality, provides the conditions where this growth is most fostered. most important is the ability to make new friends. before college, friends are sort of foisted on you via classes and neighborhood and so on (all right, maybe not so much); after college, it's harder to improve this skill because there are fewer people available to experiment on.
i think oftentimes i overemphasize this divide between the nostalgic utopia that my college days, in retrospect, were, and this gritty real world i find myself living in. but the fact remains that i simply don't know how to meet people i'm interested in. i'm sure they're around somewhere, as they were in college; however, in practice, the people who i find most intriguing are people who i have no natural path to get to know better.
i'm almost certainly leaving berkeley in nine months. this should serve as impetus to become more adventurous, on the grounds that burning bridges is not so important since most of these people will drift out of my life anyway. but i don't know if i really remember how.
if you're in the bay area, you're reading this, and i have no idea who you are, please send me a quick e-mail. because you are the precise person i would like to meet: a total crapshoot. may as well roll the dice before they self-destruct.