When I look back at my recent four years of college at Georgetown, I see two awesome years sandwiched in between two years of hype. Although most frequently used to describe anticipation or eagerness for something great (“upside hype”), hype also refers to the anxiety and dread before something terrible (“downside hype”). The perfect contrast to the upside hype of freedom to be enjoyed, friends to be made, and girls to be pursued I felt in 2008 entering college is the downside hype I felt in 2012 leaving for the real world, the working world in New York City. Hang out time with friends on weekdays converts into 60, 70, even 80 or more hours at a desk, no strings attached morphs into commitments and eventually marriage, test-taking anxiety degenerates into unemployment anxiety. The potentially negative transformations are endless.
A common observation about hype, however, is that it usually represents the outer bounds of possibilities. It rarely lives up to either positive or negative extremes. Hurricane season or, more generally, the fall in New Jersey, for example, is fabled as being the best time to be a surfer on the East Coast. Names like Felix, Ophelia, Ernesto and Hannah are immortalized; the 1995 and 2005 seasons turn into folklore. A storm gets a name, forecasting sites call for epic waves, and surfers go into frenzy, Instagramming buoy data and fantasizing about empty warm water barrels.
But is it really that good? Despite turning out to be a great four years, college never had a chance to outdo the hype associated with its first semester that has been ingrained into 17-year-old minds by older siblings, frat star blogs, and Hollywood – influences that make you assume if you are not constantly surrounded by beautiful women, you’re blowing it. Hurricane season suffers the same fate. The handful of walled but fun overhead days you share with just your friends are indeed priceless. However, it cannot and does not live up to expectations forged by local banter, Internet features and movies like “Dark Fall,” which make you think that if it’s fall and you’re not trading 6-foot barrels with your friends consistently throughout the entire season, you’re blowing it.
As a summer-only beach kid and weekend warrior since age 15, who for the first time was stationed by the coast for the entire fall (or near the coast depending on how you look at NYC) with free weekends and vacation days to burn, I wanted to believe the hype surrounding the immortalized season. The hype made sense; it played into a greater equilibrium of my transition out of college. If the entrance to college was over-hyped on the upside, it would follow that its exit would be over-hyped on the downside–the projected drudgery failing to account for the bliss of fall surf.
Not only did the surf disappoint, the season produced a storm that crippled the entire region’s infrastructure, economy, and spirit. Hype unfulfilled. I stumbled through November picking up the pieces from Sandy, not expecting much from the ocean as I disdainfully unpacked the boa constrictor that is my 6/5/4 wetsuit. Monitoring the East Coast forecasts over the past two winters for an occasional strike mission from Georgetown, D.C., was about as depressing as monitoring the monthly unemployment rate, only with no politicians or Federal Reserve chairmen available to serve as the scapegoat. I resigned myself to seeing the sun for 15 minutes a day on the way to my subway stop in the morning and getting two, maybe three head high offshore days.
The obvious ending to this tale of transition and expectation is the pure magic that went down over the past three months in what has to be considered the best winter, if not the best overall season, New Jersey has seen in at least a decade. Minus a three week pause in January to catch her breath, the Atlantic Ocean simply did not stop cranking out epic, flawless, world class, [insert frothing term here] surf from the Doomsday swell on the first day of winter to the weather.com titled, “winter storm Ukko” swell on the last. Six hour weekend days with only my friends and occasional vacation weekdays from work with my gracious mother taking some photos have become a blur. They make me wonder why I even bothered paddling out at all this fall, why I humored the negative perception of the real world, and most importantly why I allow myself to get caught up in hype.
