Filed under: Personal Life, Work Life | Tags: City living, Community, Journalism, LGBTQ, McColumn, New York City, Passion, Personal
There is a swelling within each of us that aches to activate itself. It wants to be a part of who we are, it wants to wake up with us everyday and climb out of the right side of the bed with us, wants to make sure that we put on one sock at a time and brush our teeth before we enter the outside world.
This ache, swell, fire can’t stand all of the mundane parts of our day. The parts where we’re forced to do the little things that get us from one big event to the next. So annoyed and frustrated becomes the swell that it enters our mind and our heart at this time, giving us the freedom to think during a shower or the encouragement to ponder such a theory or idea while cooking a meal.
Whatever you want to call this thing – an ache, a swell, a fire – it’s known as passion most frequently by you and me. It’s what we dedicate our lives to, what we stand to give to the world in a way that is careful, intentional and full, the sort of end product that is the result of internal churning, burning and a need to be a part of something bigger in what can often be a frightening, chaotic and too-big world.
My friends and I wonder about our passions daily. Who doesn’t? We wonder where to put our energy, how we can useful in this world, what difference we can make and if what we do is actually making a difference. How can it all add up if each of us is doing so little, making such a small impact while we try to stay busy and make use of where we are?
I’ve again come to a sort of crossroads when it comes to passion. I’m passionate about gay rights. I’m passionate about writing. I’m passionate about tennis. I’m passionate student development and the way we work as people. But which passion will play a foremost role in my life? Which passion can I put to use? Which passion will get me paid?
Transitioning from the realm of undergraduate academia to the always-feared “real world” presents this difficult-to-decipher stage for us all, or at least for me. I can’t figure out exactly where to put my energy or how to make a difference, and when I become too engrossed on one thing or the next I can only think of what I’m not contributing, obviously a trait that doesn’t help me in trying to get it all nailed out.
Development comes in small stages, in bursts and leaps both internally and externally. It’s impossible to know how things will turn out, but as my road continues to swerve and curl, I have to be careful to know exactly how to navigate it. Wrong turns are okay, roadblocks are inevitable. Perhaps the passion – the ache, the fire – will present itself if only I keep on going.
The everyday can feel mundane, it can feel exhausting and pointless and frustrating, but to know that it leads to something bigger, and it can encompass something so large in the span of a few hours is exhilarating. Passionately exhilarating.
Filed under: Videoblog | Tags: Britney Spears, Comedy, Dance, Friends, McColumn, New York City, Personal, Song, Video
I guess I’ve done a pretty good job of presenting the “emotional” and “critical” me on The McColumn, processing life’s challenges as I’ve met them over the last year. So as Christmas approaches and I near the one-year mark with this blog, I decided it might be fun to show the light side of myself, as well.
Two Christmases ago, while in Seattle for my senior year of college, I started humming Britney Spears’ “Piece of Me” to a holiday tune. The idea launched into a full-blown Christmas-party performance, where me and my roommate Lauren re-wrote the entire song with holiday lyrics. Eleven months later, the video was picked up by BritneySpears.com, and we were suddenly (Z-List) YouTube stars.
Rather than gawk at my Z-List status, I took it as a compliment. So last Christmas, after we made our BS.com debut, I convinced a different friend in New York to make another Britney spoof to one of her new songs. Thus the Britney Holiday Re-Make tradition was born.
Year three finds me still in New York, still spoofing Britney, and still somehow not being embarrassed by the whole ordeal. This year things got a little sideways – literally – but the lyrics and ridiculousness of it is all still there.
Merry Christmas, all!
Filed under: Personal Life, Poetry, Queer Writing | Tags: Boys, Friends, Love, McColumn, Personal, Poetry, Self love
For talking today
I feel weak
I wish I could just figure everything out
With ease
But I can’t
And that’s when I appreciate you the most
I wish we were close
At least so we could snuggle a little
No one here to snuggle with
To touch
I like to touch a lot
To be gentle
But hug firmly
Hug lovingly
I wish that I could do that with you
To hold you in my arms and let your head rest on my chest
I want that
I want to be close to you
Even though you’re married
My best friend
My itty bitty
I can’t tell you about this ache in my chest
Or I guess I could try
Since I’m sure you’ve felt it before
But you got what you want
And I’m happy for you
I’m truly happy about it
About the wedding
I just wish that this feeling would explode into flowers and rainbows
But it feels like rainclouds and sloppy fields
Stuck in my chest
Beating
Tearing
Aching at me
Like mud
I wake with it and hold my pillow tighter
That’s all I hold at night
Pillows
And not even one
I sleep with four
Does that make me unfaithful to you?
To him?
To what I want
What I need
I want to be holding him in the morning
To turn around and meet his face in my back
His nose squished between my shoulder blades
Does that actually happen?
I mean his nose?
Or would he not be able to breathe?
I bet I would be sweaty in bed
Only wanting one blanket or so
But, naked
Butt naked
I would want that in him
In our nightly routine
In me sleepily brushing my teeth
And trying to talk to him
Wanting him to decipher what I’m saying
You know
Like you used to do
You were so good at that
The deciphering part
Mostly while I was just in my underwear
More of A Poem: “Thank You” after the jump.
Filed under: Queer Writing, Sports Writing | Tags: Brendan Burke, Journalism, LGBTQ, McColumn, Media, Sports
I wondered about Brian Burke’s comment as I read it. You wish that someone else carries that burden first… There will be a great deal of reaction, and I fear a large portion will be negative. Was this Burke, the father of a gay man, being a closet homophobe? Was he actually angry with his son for putting him in such a public, possibly embarrassing situation? Could he not handle the fact that his hockey-bred son was a queer?
But the more I read about the story – the story of Brendan Burke, 20 years old, just a senior in college and a hockey team manager at Miami University in Ohio – the more I believed his father Brian’s words. The more I saw the truth to them.
Brian Burke is a hockey staple, a household name in the sporting world with a resume to last three lifetimes. He’s hockey’s Steven Spielberg crossed with the frostiness of Anna Wintour, the power of Donald Trump.
So when his son, who had grown up around hockey and toasted with his dad when the team he managed won the Stanley Cup in 2007, came out publicly this past week, it was front-page news in the sporting realm. Brendan immediately became the face of gay hockey, a heavy burden for a college student looking at law school, not to mention a guy who had had little public exposure before such action.
It was a brave and commendable thing to do, something Brendan obviously took behind-the-scenes steps to do, perhaps helped by his powerful father and family along the way. But I dare to ask this question: why Brendan?
Why this kid, who at 20, is still a student, still around hockey, a manager, a fan, a son? Why is sport stuck in a place that Brendan is the one who is making headlines while he should be making study guides, should be preparing for finals? Why is the son of a well-known hockey insider doing the dirty work for hundreds – dare I say thousands - of pro gay athletes around the world just because he’s well connected?
The first answer is the admirable one: because Brendan Burke seems to be that brave. He doesn’t seem to mind that he’ll get peppered with questions, receive letters of hate and shame, and even a few threats on his physical safety if history is any indicator. He doesn’t seem to mind that his is now the face of gay hockey, of all the little boys and girls who put on pads and skates each winter in Minnesota and Oregon and Vermont to protect not just their skin and bones, but their scared and vulnerable selves, too.
The second answer is the despicable one: there is still no present-day face of gay hockey. Nor is there one for gay basketball. Or gay soccer. Sure, we’ve made strides with athletes like Billy Bean in baseball, Esera Tuaolo in football, Greg Louganis and Matthew Mitcham in diving and Amelie Mauresmo in tennis, but in the ultra-hetero, testosterone-run sports of baseball, hockey, football, soccer and basketball, our generation has nothing. Nothing? No gay athlete has stepped up and said, This is me. Deal with it.
Enter Brendan Burke. Enter a kid who shouldn’t have to be doing what he is doing on a campus where the Greek life dominates, J Crew prep is more than popular and the GLBT population struggles daily with a very homophobic climate.
But he is. And Brendan isn’t just giving speeches or holding up a sign or participating in a panel, he’s talking on national television, being interviewed by global journalists, facing the tough questions about the queer community’s queer relationship with the sporting world that ought to be left to the men – and women – who have been in said communities for decades, not just a couple of years.
My thoughts here are not a slap on the wrist to Brendan, but more a pat on the back for him and a chin hung low for the sporting world as a whole. For a queer writer like me, who grew up playing basketball, soccer and tennis, and follows the world of sport as somewhat of an outsider, I still can’t believe we’re stuck in this place. I can’t believe we’ve only come this far.
Forget Prop 8. Forget Maine or Massachusetts or the politics of gay marriage. This is about people treating other people humanely and decently. This is about respect and love and freedom, not about choices or chastising. Why a 20-year-old kid has burdened his unpadded shoulders with such a load is beyond me. Perhaps the gay – and straight – professional athletes and their benefactors have something to learn from Brendan Burke. Perhaps that very thing is courage.
(photo by siep via flickr.)
Filed under: Personal Life | Tags: City living, Community, Emotions, Friends, Holiday, McColumn, New York City, Personal, Self love
I’m good at making lists. I number or letter them, or use little bullet points that I can later put a precise “X” through as the task is complete. It’s one of the things I do best in life. Starting in 8th grade, I would lie in bed at night with small index cards and a red pen and write out a list for the next day:
- Wake up
- Shower
- Pack lunch
- Call time and temp
- Schedule tennis practice
- Walk to school
- Confirm essay due date
They were usually made up of minor and trite events and tasks, but to me, my lists were of the utmost importance, and I kept them in a neat stack next to my bed, just in case I had to refer to them in the near or distant future.
Much like my lists, I’ve also been good at making rules for myself throughout my life. My lists were a form of rule-making, constructing my to-do’s for the day in a way that I would feel as though I had broken a rule if I didn’t complete each task on the list. I once made the rule that I would add 5 seconds of running on to my workout routine everyday (big dreamer, I know). I had the rule that I had to record every penny I spent on a spreadsheet each night (which I did for almost three years). Or the rule that I just couldn’t eat meat (which I generally have followed for the last two-plus years).
In a silly way, my rules crossed over into an emotional realm. Rules would become the force in my relationships with friends, how I dealt with certain situations or whether or not I should invest feelings in Boy X or Boy Y. My workhorse mentality that encouraged rules in a constructive, I-want-to-get-this-done sort of way turned my life into a maze of you-can-only-do-this and don’t-you-dare-feel-that.
Sitting at Thanksgiving dinner this past week, my friends and I went around the table saying what we were thankful for. It’s a cheesy exercise, but one that evokes honesty and emotion – a time for us to all reflect in a way we rarely do in our everyday lives.
My close friend, who had been through a slew of frightening and eye-opening experiences just this past fall, simply said this: “I’m thankful for strength and fragility.” The words hung in the room for a few seconds as we took them in, her honesty direct and brutal, but her thankfulness genuine and wise.
I’m thankful for strength and fragility, I thought later that night. All these years I had been making lists and rules about how I should function and what I could feel and how I need to act, but never did I see that strength and fragility might be a team. I saw them as opponents on a field, with one making a surge on one play and the other countering it the next week, flourishing against one another.
But as the thought of the two co-existing marinated in my mind, I thought of how beautiful an existence it could be. We’re all such strong individuals, having gone through and experienced things in our lives that don’t get much recognition in the day-to-day listing and scheduling. But on the same note, we remain fragile and brittle, purely human and flawed – beautifully imperfect. A world of beings that are strong and fragile all at once.
While most years I might be thankful for my lists, my health, my rules, my accomplishments, this year I find myself stirring strength and fragility together in a strange, but hearty brew. It’s a meeting I didn’t expect, but one at this point in my life I’m happy to have made – two strangers, two enemies, finally getting to know one another, and realizing that they might be able to be friends, to love one another.
The meeting of strength and fragility is something I didn’t expect, something I didn’t even think of to put on a list for this holiday season. I don’t know what sort of sub-lists might pop up now that the two have met, but there is only one rule I can operate by from here on out: Let it be. Let them be.
(photo by jphilipson via flickr.)
Filed under: Personal Life | Tags: City living, Coffee, Community, Friends, Housing works, Job, McColumn, New York City, Personal, Seattle
Smell memories are the most powerful of all memories. They’re the memories you don’t expect to come wooshing back with the rush of air into your nostrils, but when they do, they find the express lane into your mind and erect images, sounds and feelings long forgotten. Their unexpected arrival is like a slap in the face, burning your skin a bit but leaving you hopeful and aware, as if having just downed a shot of expresso. No sugar. No milk.
I open the door to the storage closet just as I have the past three weeks, sliding the key in with ease and padding the light on with the slap of several flattened fingers. I always enjoy how little amount of trouble I have with this door. It shuts behind me. I search the shelves for bottled beverages and hot coffee sleeves, mindful that customers might be out in the cafe, anxiously peaking over the counter to see if I might be crouching there, hiding from them.
The smell memory is one I don’t expect, one that I couldn’t anticipate – especially because I have spent a good few hours in this space in the last few weeks, smelling the air and breathing in the dust. But still, the air enters my nose and my memory flies back to four years ago, working in a storage closet in Seattle, rummaging through sports gear and Christmas decorations under industrial lights.
The smell in this Manhattan storage closet is that of the one in Seattle, but nothing spectacular or unique. I think of Andrew, the young, determined CPA that I was a personal assistant for who suddenly and tragically died a few months after I stood in his storage closet, sorting through lights and plastic branching in order to prepare his condo for the holidays. We were friends first, boss-employee second, and I took pride in making sure that the tree looked as perfect as a fake tree can, Oprah’s voice in the background as I put the star atop on a rainy, cold Seattle afternoon.
The memory fills my mind like a perfume, swaying the emotions in me as I think of Andrew’s tenacity, attention to detail, carefree spirit. I laugh to myself about how I cooked pot roast and casseroles in the afternoon, never having spent a moment preparing meals for myself, and Andrew would text me the next day, saying how delicious it was and his friends were raving about my culinary expertise. Thanks a lot, I thought. To “The Joy of Cooking”.
I grab the bottles of Perrier that I’m looking for and push up on to my tippy toes to see if I can find the hot coffee sleeves. I think of spending hours cleaning Andrew’s fish tank, a giant monstrosity in the entryway of his condo that would get frighteningly murky in the matter of a couple of weeks, and I’d eye it with a suspicion reserved for little fishies plotting to make my life a living hell.
I remember that storage closet well; the water skis and winter skis and poles and life jackets and winter jackets. I think of driving through Seattle in Andrew’s oversized truck slightly frightened that I may be taking up three lanes, but the cool voices of NPR consoling me along the way. The memories don’t fade, they only flood my mind more intensely as I organize boxes in the closet: shopping at the QFC for special yogurt brands; eyeing the pantry for something Andrew forgot to put on the list; sorting and alphabetizing CDs numbering the thousands.
I stand back out in the cafe, my hand on my hip, a hot cup of tea stuck in the other palm, and wonder back to why Andrew’s life was cut so drastically short. He took me on as a personal assistant in order to free up more time to build his dream home in Eastern Washington, a place where he could snowshoe in the winter and water ski and swim in the summers.
Four years on I’m unsure of what became of the already-being-built home. I’m not sure if it was finished or if the project was dropped altogether. I wonder about Andrew throughout the day, as I pour coffee, go in and out of the storage closet for more cafe supplies and the smell follows me, wafting in and out of the room as if it is a perfumed cape around my neck. I’m unsure of it all, of what it meant, but I’m positive that Andrew would have loved for the house to completed, storage closet included.
(photo by looney1 via flickr)
Filed under: Personal Life | Tags: Childhood, City living, Community, Family, Helena, McColumn, New York City, Personal, Travel
The girl next to me didn’t have a home. London. New Delhi. Singapore. She told me of the places she had grown up, hopping the globe before she landed in dainty New York City for college. I spent my freshman year in Paris. She explained this as if Paris was just a short MetroNorth ride up the Hudson from New York, and I nodded accordingly. I nodded appropriately. I watched the candy in palm melt slowly, the colored coats turning my skin blue and red and green all at once. And we’re spending Christmas in Brazil. Mom and me.
I couldn’t think much about the girl. I had to sleep on my flight back from Chicago to New York. But as I dozed off my dreams were full and flowing, unsure of location or pace. I was in Montana, home and safe, then suddenly in New York. I realized somewhere in my dream that it was one place, blended together. North Benton and Euclid turned onto Broadway, and there was Times Square, near my parent’s front porch. Turbulence. I awoke.
I peered over at the girl. She was asleep. I wondered where she was in her dreams. She told me she had been in Champaign, Illinois, for the weekend, visiting a college friend at the university there. It’s so quiet, she explained, as if I had grown up in Brussels, Montreal and Tokyo. Just fields. Sure, I thought, and 40,000 college students.
I put my head against the seat cushion, envisioning a life of flights and adventure and unknowns. It seemed appealing and exciting, exhilarating and ever-changing. But I couldn’t quite grasp it. I’ve had a home my entire life. The same home. With the same room. Always to return to, always in the same place.
Each year as the holidays approach I become strangely aware of how strange my set-up really is. The home that my parents live in, the home that I grew up in, has been the same roof and four walls for 24 years for my family. The house itself, over 100 years old, stands proud and warm and full every winter as the McCarvel kids arrive home from their different corners of the world. But we always arrive; we always come back to the same place. Home.
That night, after I returned home from Chicago, I spent an hour on the phone with my Dad as we discussed my trip home for Christmas. I haven’t spent a Thanksgiving in Helena in six years, but I haven’t missed a Christmas, not ever. This year, the bookstore wasn’t able to schedule me the way I wanted, and I was given the week after Christmas off. I would fly home on the 28th. It’ll be weird, I told my dad, not to be home for Christmas.
Weird, indeed. I scanned through the list of expensive flights home. They were always expensive. My mind wandered to the girl, and how she had probably gotten back to her Manhattan dormitory way faster than I got to my Brooklyn apartment. Jealous. I thought.
Or not jealous? I couldn’t decide. There’s this place in the world, this 1889 structure of 12 rooms and three floors and creaking wood boards that for some reason, completely holds my heart. There’s this place that I know exactly how to shoulder the door to get it open, and what creaks mean what and how to open the windows on a summer night to get the cross breeze to cool off the upstairs.
Not jealous, I settled on. There’s a chance – a good chance – that she lives beyond a full life. Traveling. Family. Friends. Joy. Warmth. But a place, that place that I go to, she doesn’t have it. She has Dubai and Cape Town and Moscow. I have 626. I have a brick-walled backyard and a tiled sunroom and a stained-glass bathroom and she has elephant rides and extravagant dinners and townhouses and city lights.
As much as I try to get away from Montana, escape the place where I started to become the person that I am, there is a weight that holds my heart to it like nothing else in the world. The smell of my dad’s breakfast cooking in the kitchen. The sound of my brothers playing MarioKart in the basement. My little sister growing a day older until all of the sudden, she’s not a newborn in my mother’s arms, but an 18-year-old woman.
Home. I can taste it. Smell it. The lilac bushes in the alley, always blooming in the first week of May. Cold winter afternoons spent shoveling our sidewalks, always such a task since we live on the corner. The sound of the radiators kicking on, as they have for 120 years.
We’re all from places. Places like Stockholm and Melbourne and Los Angeles. We all come and go to these different places as different people, growing and changing and finding out what this world is about. But I can’t imagine it all without home. Without the anchor, the place that I have slept in every room in and can close my eyes and imagine every morning I woke up there, a young boy and then a scared adolescent. The place. My home.
Filed under: Personal Life, Sports Writing | Tags: Childhood, City living, Family, Friends, Helena, McColumn, New York City, Personal, Tennis
I’ve always had an inexplicable affinity for fall. When October would roll into Montana, full of chilly mornings with mountain wind blowing across the valleys, I would wake with a certain excitement reserved only for the fall. The morning routine was distinct and unwavering: tip-toe across the cold hardwood floor of my room to a hot shower; eat a warm breakfast; pack a cold lunch; and always – always - call time and temp.
I was reminded of this a few weeks ago as my family converged on the Bay Area for my brother’s wedding. At one point during the rehearsal dinner, as my brother introduced one of his groomsmen, he joked how they still could remember the phone number for time and temperature, one of the most important seven-digit numbers to remember for any Helena kid who wanted to be outside in the fall. You could never tell by just looking out the window.
The story brought on lots of laughter from the crowd that night at the rehearsal dinner, but for me, it brought on a waive of memories I hadn’t expected on a weekend that focused on love, adult relationship and the future: those of childhood.
Autumn mornings (before school) and afternoons (after school) were those when I would race to our back alley and fill it with the sounds of a roaring crowd immersed in some game or another. Usually basketball in the fall, as one of my sisters was usually playing her high school season at that time. But often it would be tennis, too, playing the Denver Invitational or the Vancouver Open - fictional tournaments to fit the climate. My fervor and body heat as powerful as my imagination.
Fall mornings these past two years in New York I didn’t call time and temp once. I could check weather.com or just venture out not knowing how to dress, a mortal sin in my mother’s home. But instead of racing toward the A Train to catch a subway ride into the city, I was dashing to the back alley, steps from the warmth of our kitchen but worlds away. Worlds, worlds away.
The simplicity of childhood is so romantic to me now. Something I can’t have but I yearn for often. I dance naked in my apartment or talk to my friends in a goofy voice, trying to ellicit some sort of the foolish, giddy self that once dominated who I was for most fall days, dialing 4-4-2-1-7-3-0 with practiced ease and listened to the radio-like computerized voice saying “The time is 4:32.” “The temperature is 37 degrees.”
The thing is, it was almost useless to call time and temp. By the time I had been in the alley for five minutes, I had peeled off most layers and was down to a long sleeve and wind pants. Hitting the ball, or passing it against the garage as if it was my teammate on the baseline. In my world, there were two baselines in the same place: the tennis court and the basketball one. They were in the same place, but, oh, they were so certainly different.
I can’t quite remember the day that it changed so drastically. Perhaps it wasn’t one day. Perhaps it was a slow change, a change you can’t quite put your finger on. I didn’t call time and temp that day. I may have been on AOL instant messenger before I decided to go outside for a while, doing the best to avoid my middle school homework.
I remember kids passing through the alley sometimes, and me shamefully standing in the crevices of the garage hoping that they would pass quickly, not wanting to chat or be questioned as to what I was doing or who I was pretending to be. My cheeks burned of red not from the cold like it did in years before, but because of some sort of uncomfort or embarrassment.
Time and temp didn’t follow me to high school, or to college for that matter, in Seattle. It died slowly, being replaced by up-to-the-minute forecasts and “Hourly” weather maps on the internet. Now, iPhones don’t even have to dial. They only display. I wonder what happened to the time and temp voice guy. Out of a job, too?
I was awkwardly proud of myself the day an article came out in the newspaper about my budding tennis career and the writer had focused on my relationship with my alley. He talked of my dedication and my self-discipline, about how these things had helped me beat the best players in Montana tennis. It didn’t, however, mention time and temp, or the cars that would slow to let me finish a point, or grab a rebound. It talked of future and faith, instead of an unbridled childhood. It was looking toward the future, and I guess I was, too.
I think about time and temp a lot in New York, the weather can be as temperamental here as that of Big Sky country. Some mornings, when I take the train to the famed West 4th Street stop in the Village, I emerge from the subway station at a concrete park, packed with a basketball court and walls for handball, tennis practice and the like.
Never do I see any little kids hitting against the wall, measuring a forehand while describing the back story of an up-and-coming-teen (“He just isn’t supposed to win these kind of matches! What heart!”) while his breath spews out in front of him, filling the autumn air with young heat.
It makes me sad to see these empty courts, to know that no kids are rolling out of bed onto cold hardwood floors and making the way to the bathroom, dialing 4-4-2-1-7-3-0 on their way. I understand that part of it is city living, but I ignore such an excuse.
Time and temperature still exists. Right now, it’s 8:43 in Helena, and 47 degrees. A perfect evening for a little back-alley tennis. Since it’s past day-light savings time, the garage lamp would have to provide the lighting for an evening battle like this, but it would cast dramatic shadows of a classic, and the crowd would hardly notice.
I hope some kid is out there. I wish it was me.
(photo by Mattron via Flickr.)
Filed under: Personal Life, Work Life | Tags: Job, Journalism, McColumn, New York City, Personal, Student development
Three months ago, on my first day of work, I met a woman at the bookstore by chance who worked in the student administration field, a career realm I’ve considered going to graduate school for over the last 18 months. We chatted briefly, but before we could get deep into conversation, we realized that we had several West Coast connections to make — people we both knew that all worked in student services.
That night, riding the train home from work, I couldn’t shake the fact that on my first day of work at a new job that I had hoped would help me buoy my writing career, I met someone that not only works in the career field that I was interested in secondarily, but that also a person who I had made personal connections with. It just didn’t seem like a chance encounter.
The following day I headed into my second day on the job. I was consumed by the events of the prior day, seeing them as signs of what was clearly meant to be. As I sat down for my first staff meeting, I started talking with my co-worker, a rare-book specialist in her 60s.
“I’m a freelance writer,” I told her, making sure she knew I wasn’t another dorky book junky who was here to sling hardcovers. “Ah, that’s nice,” she responded matter-of-factly. “My son writes for the Times.”
The New York Times, she meant. And for the second straight day my jaw almost hit the floor. Never in my life had I met anyone who had worked for the New York Times, and here is this woman next to me saying one of her children is one of the best national-news feature writers around. The dorky book junkies were no match for the inner journalistic geekdom that lived inside of me.
I had to stop myself right then and there and realize one thing: the signs were pointing in different directions, and I had my feet firmly planed at the fork in the road, my body wanting to move forward in two opposite ways, and my heart and mind completely stuck, unsure of what to do next.
This all came hurdling back at me this past week when I went into a magazine for an in-person meeting with the editor in chief regarding freelance articles. I spent much of the week prior preparing my portfolio and dusting up my resume, hoping that a meeting like this might give me more clarity about which signal I really should be following from here on out.
I got off the subway at 34th Street just shy of 5 PM, meaning the sidewalks were packed in a way they only are in the movies. I moved with the throng of people, letting the wave carry me to Madison Avenue. It wasn’t until I had been walking for a few minutes that I noticed I was walking the wrong direction: west, and not east – I had to turn around.
I stood there on 34th, shoulders smacking against my own as I turned to trudge against the crowd and back toward my destination. Maybe I should just get back into the subway, I thought. This is the ultimate sign… I’M WALKING THE WRONG WAY!
But I continued passed the subway and made my way to the offices on 34th and Madison, taking on my meeting with some jaded confidence and letting things happen as they had been set up to. I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect, but as I walked away from the building an hour later with three business cards and the reverberations of “We’ll be looking forward to your pitches” echoing in my head, I couldn’t help but think that maybe I had ignored such a sign this time.
In two week’s time, I head to Chicago for the weekend to meet with friends and tour Loyola University. I’m not going there to look at their journalism program, but rather to see what their graduate school in student development has to offer. It certainly isn’t something I’m sure of, but at this point, I might as well continue to straddle the line between the lanes of my life. Journalism and student development have little in common, but I feel their pull equally, undoubtedly.
What signs are to come is something I’m unsure of. At this point I’m more apt to sit back and let the signs happen as they will, be amused by their sudden and unexpected arrival into my life, and then turn my head over my shoulder to peek back at them as I continue forward. Which direction am I headed, you ask? I’m not sure. But for now, I think that’s a good sign. I’ll hold it up proudly.
(photo by pokoroto via flickr.)
Filed under: Personal Life, Work Life | Tags: Financial, Housing works, Job, McColumn, New York City, Personal
The women who cleaned the hotel, restaurants, cafe and clubs on Fire Island worked seven days a week, twelve hours a day. They scurried from one spill to another, wiping and sweating, mopping and dusting, all the while chatting in furiously fast Spanish, the stuff of their Colombian roots. On the rare nights that I was up late, I would walk passed the open windows of the gym only to see them on the elliptical machines, as if their dawn-to-dusk day wasn’t enough time on their feet already.
Since I’ve returned from the island to another, larger island – Manhattan – I’ve felt as though my schedule has began to creep toward the long days, nights and never-ending run around my Colombian friends dedicated themselves to. While at times it feels invigorating, it can also feel draining, hollow and eerily lonely: a battle between working to live or living to work that is still being fought on the front-lines of my day-to-day life.
At 24, the financial friction that I face isn’t something that is uncommon of those around me. We are a new generation of the do-anything-to-survive mentality: a reality brought on by an economy in the gutter and jobs that include things like “benefits” and “salary” are few and far between. There’s a new way to make your way, and it doesn’t include much sleep.
The fact that I’m still working low-wage, think-with-your-hands-and-feet sort of jobs over a year after earning a college degree is something I struggle with often. Is this what I’ve been waiting for? Have I really arrived? It’s a point in life that certainly isn’t easy to navigate, but the murky waters of a 21st-Century recession have made the swim a difficult one: we’re dog paddling for survival.
Last week my boss at the bookstore asked me if I wanted to cover an event the following Tuesday night. “Covering” means being around as the point person at the bookstore for such event, making sure things run smoothly and assisting the event people if they need any in-house help. Beyond that, it pays well, a pretty incentive for someone who avoids cabs like the plague and will take free food over healthful, or good-for-you food at any time.
I hesitated, feeling as though something was happening that night. But upon close inspection of my well-kept daily planner and racking my brain for what could be holding me back, I committed to Tuesday night and carefully added the future payment to the well-functioning budget inside my brain: this’ll be a nice kicker.
It was days later that my friend Mike called with an invitation not normally subject to voicemail: “Hey, wanna meet the President?” Mike works in DC, and the organization he works for was throwing an event in which President Obama was making an appearance. The date? You guessed it: Tuesday night.
So I enter the world of finance and friction. To work on Tuesday night would be that extra change in my pocket, but to bow out would be a chance to meet the President of the United States, a man I greatly admire and am in awe of. The question isn’t “Which should I do?” because that answer is rather easy. Instead, the question is this: “When will it end?”
When will there be a time when I can kick the 50-hour work week and find the time for my own time? When can I have the freedom to explore New York City a little instead of working, riding, eating and sleeping? When can I enter into that unchartered territory of salary and set schedules and not have to commit to Sunday cover shifts to make it all work?
We all have to face such drama and difficulty in one way or another. And perhaps this is a glimpse of what life will be in 20 years, when I have my own kids and I have to fight my own schedule to make sure I’m there for the soccer games, the piano recitals and the parent-teacher conferences. Guess it just doesn’t get easier, does it?
But for now, it remains an open question. Do I continue to work the extra hours, the string of a dozen days, the cover shifts, for a few extra Benjamins? Or is life more worth it if my Tuesday, Friday and Sunday nights are clear so that I can be doing more exploring of this city that I live in?
New York is a place of great adventure and great expense. Nothing is easy, everything is exciting and pretty much each waking moment costs you at least a buck or two. Proving myself as the reliable, hard-working one can get me far, but is the place I reach once I’ve proved myself really where I want to be? Or am I right back to the real of which-should-I-choose and making last-minute decisions on life in the red or the black?
Tuesday night I’d like to meet President Obama, but, first, I have to get my shift covered. Perhaps I should keep the complaining to a minimum, that’s a sentence my Colombian friends would probably never mutter. Moreover, they wouldn’t have the option, and for that, I guess I’m one of the lucky ones.
(photo by NewYorkDailyPhoto via Flickr)
