Ch-ch-ch-changes...

So things are changing for both of us, Pangloss. I'm going to Wisconsin and you're headed out Colorado way. Quite a change from our prospects a mere month ago. Dismal prospects have shifted to bright opportunities, dark alleyways have opened into illuminated...alleyways.

Alleyways, of course, are narrow. They box you into a route. No turn around, no lateral movement, no offshoots. There may be a the garbage of a Korean restaurant in the way, and a mangy, rabid dog. But the only way to travel once you're inside the alleyway is forward, until you find your way out. You have to endure it the entire way. Right to the point where the metaphor loses all reasonable purpose.

I think my new job is steering me to a position of creature comforts, financial stability and social cachet. No more insulting patrons sneering at me. But I wonder how brave I am to pursue the things I sought. Will I break it off? I leave tomorrow.

The odd thing, and maybe, who knows, we can return to our subtitle's motivation with this thought, is that both of us are heading into relatively recession proof industries. The economy is going through all sorts of hell right now, but I'm going into healthcare and you're guiding wealthy WASPs down mountains. Neither of these situations will be affected. How weird is that?

So I got a job

Well, the days of slumming it in my parent's attic will soon be no more. I have procured employment, albeit far different from Martin's line of legitimate white collar work. In a few weeks, I'll load up the truck and blaze a path west to Colorado, where I'll work as a snowmobile guide.

This will be more than job. This is more on the scale of an adventure. I won't know a soul, I'm doing something I've never tried before, and my wages will necessitate my continued pauper-like lifestyle. The types of people will be quite different from me and my friends. There will be lots of money, lots of alcohol, probably lots of drugs, and lots of unbridled excess amongst my clients and compatriots. People living so high on the hog that they don't even know that the other half exists. That's what I'm stepping into.

But I'm happy for that. Sometimes I learn the most about myself, and act the most like myself, when surrounded by my polar opposites. So I'm not worried. Indeed, I think that this job will give me the opportunity to pursue that Western dream so many Americans have, whether it turns out to be fruitful or not. And who knows, I might like it so much I won't come back.

Potential waster

You post, as usual, brings up a unique perspective, Pangloss. I have had similar experiences, working in a dead-end job with people who have no desire to find another avenue. This happens a lot in the service industry. People are professional servers, sometimes pulling down as much as $33k a year, which isn't great money but considerably better than most and even tastier when you consider how much of that isn't getting reported with taxes. But when conversations arise over our lives, the fact that I have a college degree is an often flummoxing fact.

Why don't you get another job? You are over qualified for this, they say. And I am. And I hate it when I look at them and say to myself that while I appreciate the work and do a good job, I feel I am better than this job. I do not live based on these earnings and I will not do this the rest of my life. Serving is awful work and if I did it forever, like many of them will, then I'd consider myself a burnout.

The only thing I consider redeeming about myself when I think this is that being aware of how ruthlessly patrician it sounds perhaps means that I don't mean it as much, or at least know what kind of asshole says this stuff. Like I have the right to scorn a job. But then again, a lot of the people there have kind of burned out. Drop outs who have smoked themselves THC stupid and rednecks who are so convinced that they've got something bigger coming around the corner but won't give up "a good job." Maybe this is the end and it's all they need or want. But there are people who work there also who are on breaks from getting their degrees and will never finish, and I know they don't want this as the end. They have skidded off the track.

I don't ever know how to feel about these things. I am overqualified to be a bartender and so I am not out of bounds of saying that I want to find more challenging work. But then the people who work there who never planned on doing that forever but now have to do so. I think what I'm facing is the question of whether I can think of wasting potential as a bad thing, bad enough to reflect on the character of the person who wasted it.

Strange old town

In my off days I've been working at an apple farm in my hometown. It's nice because it gets me out of the house, outside, and doing honest work. Although carrying a bushel of apples around your neck for six to eight hours a day is rough, the pay is good and I have the pride of doing well something that most people would shirk from. And the views from the orchard are fantastic.

The guys I work with are a bizarre group. Two are Mexicans who have worked there for about 10 years. Then there's Jimmy, a kid who went to the prestigious high school in town but never went to college, though he's clearly smart enough to, and just sort of seems to bum around town doing whatever suits him. Then there's my old friend who's getting ready to move to Hollywood to make movies, though he loves working at the orchard. Finally there's the eccentric owner of the orchard, who rants about poor people not working and makes leering comments about woman at the fruit stand, yet pays us well and keeps the whole insane operation running in the black.

As I was plucking Jonagolds from the tree today, I silently listened to their conversations about women, politics, jobs, lazy kids who aren't working there anymore, high school football, the local police, and the like. And I realized that their conceptions of who they were and how they were living their life was so different from mine. Here I am, trying to find a purpose, a path, some noble truth to which I can dedicate myself and achieve great things. I've got an internal set of principles that, as much as I struggle with them, manage to guide my decisions and intentions. But these guys don't operate like that. When they talked about what they wanted, be it money or women or whatever, that thing became an end in and of itself. What they would do and how they would act with it was given no consideration. They gave only thought to what they could gain, and not a thought to how such a gain would require them to act if they were to be good men.

I realized today that the vaunted, lofty ideals of my liberal arts education are truly carried forth by few in this world. That is not a derisive moral judgment on my part; I understand that others have traveled different paths than I and perhaps understand certain things far better than I ever will. But as I work to pay my way out of this town, I must confront the fact that many people either do not or must not consider their actions beyond its immediate utility to them. They do not say, "What is required of me?" but rather, "What will this get me?" Perhaps that is the unfortunate fact of surviving in this world. Yet I believe such is the basic but vital root of problems that we see and try to solve only on the large scale.

Some cannot help this, for they have never been given opportunity to achieve such perspective. Yet even those who are educated, like my old friend and the orchard owner, fall short. It is education that we should vaunt, not the educated, for the educated may go out and make that terrible sin of squandering a good thing granted. But education, one of inquiring, considering, and reasoned critique, lies there, waiting patiently for those who choose to take it up and use it for what it was intended: to better human life, even if only one, by revealing the right and good way to live out one's desires and actions.

I'm trying to escape from this town, but I'm not wishing it so yet. Perhaps these guys were given to me so that I can see what I have been given in my education. And I hope that soon I can give something back.

A real job, Geppetto

So this is what it's like to be emerging from the Twilight. I did have a successful interview, Pangloss, and the result is that I have a job -- a real job. I'm moving out of the basement and into an apartment. Never again will I work for tips. Such a rich and wonderful feeling I thought I'd never know.

And your thoughts are well received, Pangloss. The primary anxiety I've faced since receiving the job offer has been a continuation of the same fear I expressed in my last post. One of the post-grad hopes I had strongly embraced had been the fact that for my lack of direction I also had a lack of obligation. This new job, while not an obligation in the same way that, say, a kid, a wife or major debt might be, is nevertheless such a reassuring reentry into the security of stability that I fear I might pick up a kid, a wife or major debt just to ensure that I would never leave it.

But don't worry, Pangloss, because I'm not abandoning our blog just yet. For one thing, I have an entirely different set of anxieties to worry about. Like moving to a new place where I know almost no one, taking a job I have no idea how to do and attempting to do all of the things that adults do without very much experience. I also get the added bonus of going an entire month on my own without any income, as checks come every month. So that's fun.

Congrats

Martin, I congratulate you on what sounds like a successful interview and on finding a good company to work for. And as for your qualms about reconciling your past plans with your current situation, I would not worry too much. Ideals and dreams are a beautiful thing and we should all strive to achieve them to their nth degree. But it is a fact of our flawed human existence that it cannot be so.

Just because we cannot immediately dedicate our life to the cause in which we believed wholeheartedly does not make us immoral or lesser human beings. Indeed, if we manage to keep alive that belief through the harsh reality of our world, then that is all the more credit to our faith and belief in the idea that we are called to something greater. And transcending that immediate difficulty to achieve noble things testifies that we are more than those we must tread with in daily drudgery, in secure but unfulfilling work.

Do not worry about losing that desire to go abroad, to see and do great things, to help where it is needed. If that dream cannot survive in the face of security, prosperity, and comfort, then it is a dream not worth having. And if that dream fades despite your desire to keep it alive, then it is not meant to be. We cannot control our situation or station in life, but we can control our choices. Choose to seek that path in your daily life; awake and say, "Today will put me one step closer to what I know is right." If in the end you follow that dream, then wonderful. If not, then don't lose sleep over it. Choice is the only thing we can really control and Fate must rule the rest.

Again, I congratulate you, Martin. Go with boldness along this path, for that is all one can do if unsure. Choose your dreams.

An interview

Pangloss, sorry I have been so long in posting a response. You see, I was out of town. I had a job interview. For a real job.

It was a crazy experience -- the company paid for my flight to their location, paid for my stay at a (nice) hotel, bought dinner, breakfast and lunch, and picked up every taxi bill as well. My first thought, as soon as I arrived at the hotel, was how bizarre it seemed that a company would be so interested in me. After all, six months before any given day this week, I was probably drunk on Spring Break. I thought, if these people only knew me well enough, they'd realize how silly it is to hire me. But then, that's how a lot of people feel, I bet.

Of course, this company is a real company with huge revenue numbers. They're capitalist to the bone. They're expanding rapidly. They're the opposite of what I thought I would do when I graduated. And now that I'm in the running for a real job with real pay and real benefits, it unsettles me that I am so excited at the possibility of abandoning the hopes I had when I was in college for a life that eschewed conventionality in favor of vibrancy. What does this mean for me?

For starters, I haven't completely abandoned my ethics. The company is incredibly gracious and very concerned about doing the right thing. It's not Google, but they're motto is not very different from Google's "Don't be evil" mantra. So I've either a) found the shining example of responsible profit-motive or b) been seduced. Either way, though, I've let something slip since college. Taking this job, if I'm offered it, doesn't mean that I'm entirely selling out, but it does mean that already, in the three months since graduation, I've become something of that person I used to disparage. You know, the college-age liberal who was not quite so willing to forgo the luxuries provided him in the safe environment of the university when he was on his own. "Fight for world peace, until you find that you might have to go without HBO!"

It also means that I have to abandon, at least for a few years, my plan to go international. It once was incredibly formalized and had since devolved into little more than foreign vagrancy, but it still holds a dear place in my heart. Deny that? For a job? Where is my gusto? In six months, I might only be able to find it in my locker at the country club.

The company, though, really was great. I'd love to work for them, at any age, which is part of what makes this process so frustrating. If I had already gone into the great big world to have my adventure, then this is exactly where I'd like to work when I came home. The company really seems perfect, save one thing. While they may have arranged all flights and accomodations, I did still have to pay for parking at the airport.