So okay, I feel like a fraud sometimes?
I’m not real intimately acquainted with the “senioritis” concept because I dropped out of high school and drifted around for a couple of years, picking up 21 hours a semester at community college to ameliorate crippling Denver-induced boredom, then haphazardly applied to undergrad institutions and wound up at my college, with my major, by complete and merciful (also incredibly hasty–like in the space of 3 weeks) accident. I never took the SAT, agonized over a list of dream schools and safety schools, wrung my hands over essays, strutted and preened over acceptance letters and then spent a torporous summer waiting for my life to start, scooping ice cream at Baskin Robbins and making out with a guy who wouldn’t give me the time of day in high school.
Well, you know, until now?
Which: HA HA! ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT!
But listen. Sometimes I am sitting in my shitty little car at a stoplight and I’ll look around at all the drivers in late model vehicles around me, drivers who are my age, drivers, I can extrapolate, with car notes and obligations that keep them up at night, drivers in baby cars, drivers who have to hold down jobs so they can make payments on that 4/2.5 they bought in Coppell two years ago. With the wall-to-wall carpeting and the 2-car&c. And I go, what the fuck am I doing?
In another year this shitty car I am sitting in is going to give (these days I like to call her New Orleans. Too soon?) and I won’t ever have the money or the credit to get another, so I’ll get a bicycle. I think this, and I think: I am crossing a rubicon into a lifestyle almost everyone around me doesn’t subscribe to. I refuse to get involved with material things because—what? I take consolation from ideas?
This morning I wanted to know how much money I could make if I decided to go into publishing out of grad school. You know, just to see! And I looked up “pay scale” because I couldn’t remember the word “salary” because I have spent my summer doing the adult equivalent of scooping ice cream and making out with the captain of the soccer team and in the fall I am leaving to complete some unfathomable, quixotic mission for which I feel very poorly personally and spiritually equipped and even though I don’t want stuff there is no promise of stuff at the end of this, no obvious reward save the dubious self-assurance that I am Smarter Than You when it comes to Inscrutable Stuff No One Cares About (Hi Jonathan Lethem!) and I dunno—I think I am just having a totally-advisable moment’s hesitation right before I go off and do The Rest of My Life.
To be fair, the thought I think right after “You can’t remember the word SALARY? YOU ARE A FRAUD” is “You really need to get to Alabama yesterday.” Six, one half dozen, etc. So whatever.
unreliable narrator said,
May 23, 2009 at 2:43 am
I have this memory of walking across Harvard Yard with my Boston roommate right out of the poetry program there, and we were talking because I was trying to decide whether to take the job as managing editor at the Unnamed Literary Magazine. My roommate was a managing editor for the Other Literary Magazine, working under the same university’s auspices, so she was at the exact same, what is that word, oh yeah, payscale.
Anyway we were standing right in front of Widener, this is 1998, and she goes, So what salary were you going to ask for? And I’m juggling books and brushing back hair and confused and I’m all—I don’t know, I thought maybe $18K? Or is that too much—maybe it’s more like a $15-16 job. And my roommate fell over laughing onto the grass. And when she could talk again, she was all, Dude, I am at the exact same payscale and I make $34,000. But I was defensive, because the only jobs I’d had for YEARS were the jobs where you get $2 an hour and under-the-table tips, but you have to scrape the coins off the plastic placemats where they are stuck with hoisin sauce.
I don’t know what any of this means.
I also spend a fair amount of time staring at the unbelievably ugly blinds and carpeting in the nth ugly apartment I’ve lived in, and suspecting that I’ve somehow screwed up w/r/t the whole birthright-versus-pottage situation.
Could I try the blueberry cheesecake, even though I already know I’m going to order a single scoop of raspberry sherbet on a sugar cone?