"Where in Boston did you live?" I asked the Irish expat.

"Around.  Cambridge, Somerville, Medford."  Those words only mean one thing, and when I said I go to Tufts, he said he went to Fletcher, and it was all I could do to quash a squeal.

I might be alone in this, but Fletcher students are like demigods to me, swiftly on the path to becoming Somebody but who studies in the same cubicles I do.  They're young enough in their career to be tangible.  So running into a graduate here, without warning in a small language school in Omura, Japan, where people don't know what semesters are, let alone Tufts or Davis Square, was like a lightening rod.  My mind shot forward to the hopes of a future awaiting me in Medford/Somerville, still several months away.

Yet something about this man refused to fit into my ideal of what a Fletcher grad should look like, two decades on.  I was first taken aback when he (only half) joking asked me how large I expected my debt to be by the time I started my career.  I laughed awkwardly, and asked him what he's doing now.  An english teacher.  Going from country to country, picking up odd jobs.  Jobs for which graduate school is decidedly unnecessary.

I backtracked, confused.  "What did you hope to do when you were in school?"

He answered politely, but with the mild disinterest I've noticed among people with degrees I drool over and who stopped using them years ago, if ever.  "To work in Brussels, at the EU.  I did it too, for seven years."  Here we go, I thought, happy, and then I heard how he refused to conform to the system, and after a few years, he wasn't working there any longer.  And that was that, and his degree has been gathering dust ever since.

This isn't to say that teaching English and wandering the globe in this way is bad, it's just not what I had expected.  At first I was harrowed, but now I simply wonder if Legally Blonde 2: Red, White, and Blonde has any practical value, after all.  I doubt this man waltzed into Brussels with pink, scented documents, but he spoke of his former self as naive and idealistic.  He does seem to have been the nail that got hammered down.  How much does one have to conform to be effective within the system, without being ejected from it entirely?