After three and half years at college, I found myself back where I had started: in my parents’ house.
When I had originally crafted the grand plan to graduate a semester early, my intention was to squander my life savings on an epic road trip that would lead me to new destinations (namely, the Southeast) and through some of my favorite parts of the country (namely, the West) for approximately 4 months before returning to New York City to placate my mother by participating in the ritual of graduation.
But, I soon recognized, after a pretty significant hike/heart-to-heart conversation with my father, that there was no way that the type-A personality that I had cultivated for 21 years, only to briefly attempt to destroy in my junior year of college, thus leading to its revival and application into realms like freelance writing and zinemaking, was not going to handle unabashed freedom and inconsistent schedules well. Maybe my dad put it best as we hiked (and eventually got a bit lost ) on a trail in Scottsdale, Arizona, “I just see you getting really bored after a couple of weeks of traveling.”
The statement really struck me because, well, he was right. Thus, when I returned from my last “winter vacation” with my parents, I began the process of looking for a job.
The problem with having well-defined political and social beliefs as well as with being fiercely, bordering on snobbishly, academic is that most jobs sound exceedingly boring. (That whole line should be read with an affected British accent) And even when a job does sound interesting, there is the barrier of the Human Resources officers who can’t see beyond the fact that my degree is not in something professionally applicable like “business” or “accounting” or, at least, “economics.” Having earned my degree in biological anthropology proved to be restrictive. Eventually, I reduced my major to solely anthropology, mainly due to the fact that 99% of the populous has no idea what anthropology, let alone biological anthropology actually is.
The other problem with my job search is that I had the Lloyd Dobbler syndrome. Lloyd Dobbler, the protagonist in Cameron Crowe’s 1989 movie Say Anything was eating dinner with his over-achieving, Valedictorian girlfriend’s father when dear old dad asked what he planned to do with himself after graduation. To paraphrase, Lloyd (played by the utterly awesome Evanston, Illinois native John Cusack) replied “I don’t want to buy anything sold or processed, sell anything bought or processed; or process anything bought or sold.”
I pretty much felt the same way when it came to describing the type of job I desired. Of course, this job description proves pretty limiting in a capitalist economy. From what I could discern, I was left with non-profit organizations and government work. And to make things just a wee bit harder on myself, I knew that I didn’t want to work in Chicago or New York, the only two cities where I had ever lived and where I had the most “connections.”
During the course of my junior and senior year of college, I had compiled a list of potential cities to move to: Madison, WI; Seattle, WA; Portland, OR; Omaha, NE; Minneapolis, MN; Boise, ID…and during my last semester of school I had even, rather seriously, considered moving to Santa Monica, CA with a cool boy who I had befriended (he later opted to move to Hawaii.) Nowhere, never, did I consider Washington, D.C…
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