I will Never Ever buy a quartz countertop for my kitchen. In the category of most obnoxious and numerous fake blog comments, the winner is http://quartzcountertopsforkitchens.com/ — as you know, the competition’s fierce!
One of my students and I got off at the same train stop. As we walked to class, she told me how hard it is for people her age to find a job. I’ve been following Barbara Ray’s posts about young adults, so I took this opportunity to ask an actual young adult something these posts have made me wonder: if Millennials want security and meaning in work but scramble to find even part-time employment, will there be less emphasis on having a status job in years to come? Will this generation change the strong link between career and identity that many of us living in this country feel? She answered, “Money is money!” I like that. I’m trying to adopt her attitude.
Yesterday, I was talking to a dear friend who posed the question: is my creativity a liability? She—a woman with an MFA in Writing who is is currently considering returning to school to get a second master’s degree, this time in a field that’s perhaps even more obscure—feels that following her passion comes with a choice. Does she “grow up” and allow her artistic desires to be relegated to accepting roles in community theatre in her spare time? Or does she continue trying to design a place of her own making, some place that is specific to her unique talents and the related vision she holds for her own life? I asked her if it has to be an either/or situation. She wasn’t sure. I don’t have any impressive answers for this sort of question. But I’m hoping someone reading this post does! Suggestions for my friend?
My girlfriend hands me a flyer and says, “You’ll want to see this.” She’s in charge of the snail mail—the only time I check our mailbox is if I’m expecting a check—and usually throws out any junk mail addressed to me. The flyer is from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the expensive school I received my MFA in Writing from. In bright red letters it informs me: your new career starts here. Ha! I don’t need to study art and design; I’m still wondering what to do with the other career I ostensibly began there. Actually, I never thought of going to art school as planting seeds for some solid career, but now I wonder if perhaps I should have—here an invitation from my alma mater is inviting me to return so that I will “grow. create. stay competitive.” Certainly some people I graduated with, people with more talent or drive or skill or luck, must feel as if that degree gave them a professional edge. But me, I’ll seek “professional growth” outside another incredibly expensive program at SAIC.
This weekend I watched the first season of Hung (http://www.hbo.com/hung/index.html) in one sitting. I love seeing what the character Tanya does for work after receiving her MFA. In her words, she is a “poet, a temp, and a pimp.”
I got what I’ve been wanting—sort of. I’m on my third week of a full-time job. It’s temporary and without benefits, but I’m getting the flavor of what it’s like to sit at a desk forty hours a week, shamelessly checking my email when there’s downtime. It’s left me wondering if a full-time job really would be the panacea I’ve often pictured. Now I realize that if I’m hired for a full-time position, I’ll probably have benefits, but not just one job. Each week, I see a handful of bodywork clients. I wouldn’t want to give that up, and it’s hard to fit that work in around forty rigid hours elsewhere. Now I’m doubting this full-time-job dream, but I haven’t completely made up my mind. I’m trying to decide which really is more valuable to me—money or time? When work isn’t coming in, all I think about is money. When I am overworking, I long for time. These last few weeks, I’ve been working with a man who is eerily patient. We sit together for hours. I’m trying to use every free minute at work to do things such as schedule massage clients and pay my bills online. He sits there, very Zen-like, sometimes sharpening pencils. One day I complimented his patience, and he said that he likes to think about the sort of spider that spins a web at night. It begins with a single thread, but becomes a beautiful web by morning. But he failed to mention that then the spider tears its web down and begins the process again.
When I left my apartment this morning, I was worrying. Would I have work for August? If not, would I have enough money? What wrong turn did I take to be having this conversation with myself again? I’d been ruminating in this manner for several minutes when an elderly woman dressed entirely in pink passed me on the sidewalk. Our eyes met and she said, “It’s okay, I look terrible in my clothes, too.” I interpreted her comment as a fair insult. I have almost no fashion sense even when I’m trying, and I was on my way to work out and had on baggy sweats, a basic tank top with a built in bra, and flip flops. So I thought that insult was semi-funny, but after she walked past me, the elderly woman screamed over her shoulder, “You whores are all going to hell!” She kept glancing back, shouting variations of this opinion. She had to be shouting at me because no one else was around. I wondered what it was that inspired her to repeatedly call me a whore. Was it the royal blue polish, painted on my toenails since July 4? Or perhaps my fairly recent tattoo that I think makes me look like I might ice someone? I decided the bright pink lipstick she had on made her look much more whorish than me. And of all the things I worry about, going to hell is not one of them.
Virtue?
I checked the dictionary, and one definition of patience is “an ability or willingness to suppress restlessness or annoyance when confronted with delay.”
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/patience
I don’t have this. I can’t stand delays, but life is full of them. When I apply for jobs, I can’t help but picture my life with the particular schedule, income, and benefits that would come with these positions. Especially in this economy, the chances of getting offered even one of the positions I’ve applied to are pretty small, even when I have a decent chance. Although I think of myself as artistic, I’d like to be able to predict my weekly, monthly or even—wow!—yearly income. I wouldn’t mind having a set work schedule, too. Maybe my writing would be even more creative if my process of making a living required less energy and imagination? Either way, I don’t seem to be practicing patience. I’m practicing impatience and wondering, other than surfing the net for things that I might someday be able to buy, what can I do with this longstanding, well-developed quality of mine?
Peas in a pod
One of my favorite baristas these days—other than some of my coworkers, of course—is James W. I was up super early one morning before James had any other customers, and we discovered we’re both English majors and baristas in our mid-30s, with student loans we aren’t likely to fully repay in our respective lifetimes. I asked James if I could interview him about this. He was nice enough to say yes. This is what we talked about:
What were you taught getting a college degree is about or for?
Well, I’m from downstate Illinois—a small farm town right outside Peoria, Illinois. And that’s where my parents are from. My mom was a nurse. So she went to nursing school, but my dad never went to any sort of school. They worked hard all their lives—you know, there were six kids in my family, and so I think college was always something that they taught us was a way to sort of get out of the lower-middle-class existence. I grew up in a trailer. I mean, we weren’t poor. I wouldn’t consider us poor, but my parents struggled. So there was an assumption that getting a higher education degree would allow all of us kids to get out of that sort of life.
Physically you got to move away. Do you feel like getting your degree actually allowed you to change your standard of living?
Honestly, no. I have overwhelming debt now that I’m an adult. Now I have a family myself. But I will say, though, that I have gone back to my hometown and met people I grew up with who didn’t go to college. And I still think I’m grateful that I did go to college because I went to a small liberal arts college, so I read a lot of what’s considered classics in western philosophy and literature and all that. And I feel like my perspective widened. But at the same time I didn’t understand, at least not economically, what I was signing up for. I just always assumed that I was supposed to go to college and that was what was going to help me have a better life—than my parents did for instance.
And you were never pushed to study business or something particular?
No. I was always taught that you should follow your heart. And the two are sort of at odds because you have to have your hands in all sorts of different things to make your ends meet. So, for me, following my heart is pretty at odds with paying off my student loans. Performing in bars with bands there’s not a lot of money unless you’re in a band that’s somehow caught on. And I have been in one band where we were packing the rooms every night, and we were making okay money. But every other band I’ve been in has not been like that. That’s not the norm, at least for me.
I’m interested in hearing about your debt—whatever you feel comfortable sharing.
I came to Chicago after I graduated because I was in a graduate program. To be quite honest, the only reason I continued going to school is I had no idea what to do after I graduated. And so, I didn’t finish my first year. I ended up dropping out and I got a job at Leona’s down the street. I did start paying off my loans, but at some point I just wasn’t making enough. So I applied for the economic hardship. I think I read you could only do that one or two years in a row. At some point I just stopped even filling out the paperwork for that and stopped trying to make payments. And then, the collection people started calling me and it would always lead to an argument because they’re real bastards.
You might already know about this program now I’m on now—Income-Based Repayment http://www.ibrinfo.org/about.vp.html
If your loans are already in default you don’t qualify. They actually were willing to work with me to a certain extent. It was going to be like two hundred—two hundred forty, two hundred fifty—every month for like two years to get my loans out of default, and then I would qualify. But for four years I’ve been the only income in our family. My wife has been a stay-at-home mom since our kid was born. I’ve been making like 15,000 a year for a family of three. Fortunately, we live in America. We still live a very comfortable life. What I always end up feeling like with all this debt stuff from school is like I’m some total failure. I get these letters that threaten the most severe legal action, and I’ll get into this state like what have I done wrong? This whole conversation, it’s an interesting one because on the one hand, you have this horrible debt, and on the other I feel like I’m a better person for having gone to college. And on another hand, I could have gone to a state school and had a pretty good education for much, much cheaper. Or I could have studied something else and gotten a good job. [Laughs] Really, the issue is the debt. The issue is the debt. Sometimes I wonder if I could end up in jail over my student loans!
Yes, to me it’s such non-productive stress.
There’s a whole bluegrass song about—something like keep it simple and don’t try to get above your raisin.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-caXnADGdI4
I try to keep that in mind and not get too down about my debt. But I don’t know.
