20 Days Till 25
March 5th, 2011 § 3 Comments
Early Morning, March 5
Twenty days until I turn 25. It’s 3 a.m. and I’m sitting on the couch with my computer, still wide awake. The Boy is passed out next to me, cuddling a blanket.
Meanwhile I’m still awake doing the same thing I have since college, and since I quit CVS to move to the city, and since I quit that day job where that office manager yelled at me every day of every week for three months until I decided I valued my sanity and self-esteem more than a paycheck, and since I was “let go” from that other job that wasn’t necessarily my dream job but was a damn sight closer to writing for a living than any other attempt at employment I’ve tried on since graduation. I’m practicing my self-induced insomnia that creeps up on me when I’m bored or indecisive or trying not to think about bills and how much 300-word scholck I’ll have to write tomorrow – on a Saturday – to be able to pay them. I write about payday loans for $8.50 an article so that I can rent my apartment in the city without needing to borrow one myself. The only “easy cash, wired fast!” that will hit my bank account is the weekly payout from a few douchebags in Philly who hired me as their in-house writer and then decided that programmers deserved office space and health benefits more than the person who translates their search engine marketing into readable English that makes Google list their sites first. To quote my favorite line from an Andy Samberg SNL Digital Short, “Welcome to the real world, jackass.”
So this is me at 24-almost-25. Still awake surfing the Internet at 3 a.m. just like I was at 18-almost-19 in college. The setting has changed, but my feelings towards adulthood and my preparedness for it haven’t.
3:24 a.m. Time to close the computer and go to bed. Turn off the kitchen light, rouse The Boy from his sofa slumber.
“Honey…” I stand in front of him, poking his knee.
Sleep grunt. He hides it under the blanket.
“Honey, come to bed.” I shake his other leg.
“Mmm, I mmnammnammm…” His words aren’t working right now.
“Honey…” I curl up on top of him, which is hard because even though I’m tiny, he’s pretty tightly wound. I give a pleading look to his closed eyes. “Get up and come to bed.”
He wakes up with all 100 pounds of me on him. “…Halp.”
Sliding my feet to the floor, I stand, taking his hand to pull him up. He sits on the edge of the cushion for a moment, head dozing forward until I lift his chin and coax him back to bed.
As he stumbles off, I reach up to turn off the light on the bookcase, stroking Kenzy on the nose a few times as I do and wishing him goodnight (he’s been sleeping up there all night, his favorite perch in the apartment). I turn 25 in 20 days, and this cat is the only life form I feel comfortable being responsible for right now.
I’m not old enough to be almost-25. Tomorrow I’m going to clean the apartment like an adult.
Did I Mention my Office Has a View?
June 30th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
In a fit of relevance, I’ve applied to blog about poverty in America for Change.org despite potential conflict of professional interest. See, I sell payday loans for a living. Kind of. I write lots of web copy for an advertising agency that promotes a lot of payday lending websites and come home feeling like a sleazy car salesman most days. But the lounge has a Wii and payday loans are only a small branch of the company and I have my own office with a view (of incoming Regional Rail trains and Drexel dorms, but it’s still a view!) and this is the first time I’m actually getting paid to use my writing degree, so it balances out, right?
I had a discussion last week with a good friend of mine over $3 merlot about how the university we both attended awarded us degrees with a huge weight of "Change the world or die inside!" philosophy attached to them. It’s not a bad thing, don’t get me wrong. This is a school that grooms the likes of Christian activist Shane Claiborne, who’s deeply invested in reclaiming blighted communities like Philadelphia’s Kensington district with genuine love and charity and now blogging about it and other issues of faith and national poverty for CNN. I’m honored to have interned with people closely connected with him last summer.
But what about the rest of us? Graduates who believe in faith, love, and charity but work standard 9-to-5s trying to love our coworkers as ourselves? Is it wrong to work for Corporate America or Big Retailers or payday loan advertisers (who, incidentally, also promote debt management and online college degree websites so I don’t look like a total soulless sell-out) when we’re called to change the world? What is world-changing, anyway? Is it blogging about complex social issues, or radically changing your lifestyle to support and love the poorest of the poor, or can it sometimes be more subtle than that? Maybe it’s just my guilty conscience speaking as I sit in the air conditioning in my comfortable one bedroom apartment that I make enough money to pay the rent and utilities for on my own.
I want to change the world, but I’m not a Shane Claiborne. I guess I’ll keep the day job for now and find my own smaller ways to influence world change somehow.
What do you do with a BA in English? or My Life as a Post-Grad
July 29th, 2008 § Leave a Comment
Nothing makes me feel like a waste of four years and $128,000 more than the post-graduation job search. Finally, after spending half the summer deciding where to look for employment and the current half papering the East coast with a trail of resumes, I’ve landed a month-long temporary assignment as a receptionist for a PVC plant an hour from home.
Living at home after spending the last four years growing into some version of an adult is interesting. My parents think that I’m still 14 years old. My mom thinks I’m an alcoholic because I buy a bottle of wine every couple of weeks. On the plus side, I don’t have to cook, pay utilities, or do laundry. It’s like the weekends I used to spend at home during college. But then I wake up and realize that this is the rest of my life. Functioning in the real world isn’t quite what they make it out to be.
