Reality Bites

When I graduated from Binghamton University with my undergraduate literature degree in English Literature in 1994, I rented a movie called Reality Bites starring Winona Ryder and River Phoenix. It was about naive graduates entering the "real world" (GAP clothing store jobs, relationships, becoming adult) and it featured Lisa Loeb's song, Stay. I watched the film by myself and it hit me as a big chill sort of flick - like it was an initiation, in film at least, of how harsh adulthood would really be. Still, the youth of the actors, the thrill of their fame, the narcissistic, yet optimistic drive of their ambition (or lack thereof), and the possibilities of being something bigger upon graduation, was harshly captured in a romantic, non-apocalyptic reality check of growing up. It bit. Reality bites, hence the title.

Last night, I started thinking about how cute Lisa Loeb was in her music video, but also how caught in a moment of my generation's time that film actually was. We get old. School finishes and we're kicked out to society, and society is more complicated, more severe, more difficult than any class could have prepared a student to know.

Quirky as it is, I embrace the song and hold onto it as a sacred gem of moving forward. A two hour film can't capture the harsh reality of making one's way into the world, but it touched upon my idealism at the time. No matter what anyone says, the song still resonates with me today.