That Gap Year

Back in medical school, we all have these little elective postings cleverly disguised as leisurely holidays - but in reality serve as mandatory indentured labour at the nearest hospitals. The Mother Teresas of the group usually pick menial drudgery in the busy inner-city hospitals, slaving away in internal medicine and surgery.

Me, I picked relatively laid-back radiology and a pink daiquiri on a sunny beach in OZ. Where I serendipitously bumped into an entire group of fellas in their gap year.

Gap Year. Ostensibly the year you take off from college to register yourself in the grand university of life. Seemed like a beautiful dream come true to me - just to have a short break as a breather from classrooms, tests, and homework assignments!


You mean I have to get up, wash up and get a life in one day?
But from what I saw amongst the disheveled coterie of surfers / bartenders / waiters, it's obviously the year you take to bum around, smoke weed and zone out on 80s television reruns. I could see how seductively easy it would be to join them. The majority would return to the academic grind after that lost year - but for a sad handful, that brief break had blurred in a seedy marijuana haze into a gap decade.

And I had one of them crash at my place last weekend.

Bum : Nah, the menial drudgery of the 9-to-5 grind is not for me. Station wagon and a twenty-year mortgage, never!
Paul : And you have been a gadabout for the past ten years?
Bum : Oh yeah, dude. The greedy corporate types will never have me!
Paul : Not in those board shorts and flip-flops, they won't.
Bum : Definitely not!
Paul : So you're planning to do this for how long?
Bum : Hopefully forever! I have this bartending gig in Papua New Guinea in a month. Maybe check it out for a few months before moving.

As much as I appreciate the need to find yourself, I don't see how backpacking around the Spice Islands with a broken harmonica would help.

I was blithely hoping that perhaps he cherished dreams of being a world-renowned travel writer or even a half-competent harmonica player - but when that only earned a blank stare from him, I knew that was a wash. Perhaps as an overburdened college student, I might have commiserated with him but at this time in my life, I just wanna smack some sense into him.

Or at least some ambition.

No doubt his beleaguered parents would thank me. Where is this complacent slacker heading in life? Can accept not wanting to rule the world but does he truly intend to float around aimlessly for the next decade?