Admit Two: There's an app for that

When I think of the best apps that consume our everyday lives, I think they're essentially all perfect recipes for nostalgia. Reminiscent of our childhoods, favorite pastimes and things we enjoyed years ago, yesterday or just an instant before.

Think about it; Draw Something satisfies our inherent desires for coloring and finger painting whether we deem ourselves artists or not. Tumblr posts are as close to our leather bound journals as Tweets are to post-its on the fridge, albeit some are more public than others. Facebook helps us keep in touch with friends old and new, and lets us peel open albums at our leisure to look back at our fondest of memories. Spotify enables us to stream whatever record our mental jukeboxes can recall. Pinterest tacks our favorite images onto a virtual wall, just like we used to pin them onto our jackets and messenger bags. Words With Friends makes any moment a game night. And Instagram is like a Polaroid on steroids.

It makes me wonder if there’s a way to blend Scratch ‘n Sniff stickers into an app... But, I digress. If there really is an app for everything, what about the one for dealing with graduating? The lack of that one had been eating away at me for months, and no score of Temple Run nor a mixed-cd from high school could sate me. But, because "time won’t let me go" and "the future freaks me out," I listened to one anyway to help me cope and write what is my very last Admit Two column.

The verdict: John Mayer was dead wrong when he claimed that there is no such thing as a real world. “Welcome to the real world,” almost everything seems to say to me. But I know now that that's not such a bad thing.

It hit me suddenly, when a friend of mine asked me to meet him at an office on Broadway recently. What I assumed might be a stuffy old place populated by new and old paper pushers turned out to be a haven of entirely different stuff.

Young, hip, vibrant, fast-paced, innovative; those are the only the adjectives that come to mind about this place I'll call Oz.

While there's no place like home, like the comfort of school and satisfaction of getting an A, there is something entirely more empowering about earning your first professional paycheck, promotion and package of benefits. But that's only the fine print; there's a world out there brimming with exciting opportunities, and I was only standing at the cusp of it; quite literally frozen at reception.

It may be true that some of us already know this, but for others this year has a finality to it like no other. Like The Verve said, "It's a bittersweet symphony, this life." The prospect of leaving academia as I know it had been overwhelmingly dawning on me, personally, and it took a chance encounter at Oz to realize that it is far more thrilling out in the real world than John Mayer or anyone else let on. Truth is, you have to venture out there and discover that for yourself. 

I didn't stay at Oz for long, just chatted with my friend by the entrance a few moments. But I found out that it is indeed a thriving place for various startups busily reinventing our lives. Here, everyone's a wizard.

I needed just that charming token of experience to feel completely refreshed and optimistic about life after college. It was like a teaser to what life could be like only if we let it and let go like Frou Frou suggested, “because there's beauty in the breakdown.” Who knows, maybe I’ll create an app for that.

Whether I do or not, I just wanted to take a moment to thank you readers for granting me the amazing opportunity to ramble on about the arts with you this past year and curate it for you in this section the year before. It’s been swell. But it doesn’t end here. Watch out for more from me beyond Admit Two, maybe even reporting the news at a TV screen near you.