The Ironies of Employment
I think when I look back on this time in my life and wherever this academia train leaves me, I guess I am now facing some of those piviotal questions of "what if." I can't find a job around here, apparently I am not qualified to be an adminstrative assistant, and I am ready to start looking for a cash register job - but proof came today that moving and surviving in New York would have been viable. Viable two times over... two different paths that are professionally cleared and ready for take off. No sure way to tell, but I hope that I have chosen wisely. Overall, it probably would have been the most fun to work in a video / media arts gallery and honestly, I probably would have learned a whole heck of a lot too. That, coincidently, seems to be the least likely way to make regular loan payments and be able to afford lettuce that isn't brown.
This has to be a question and a time of deciding to go forward and not looking back. It is too useless to speculate and it is too easy (and tempting) to romanticize what could have been elsewhere, on another path, in another city, in another life. I think I have always questioned the idea of fate, but never doubted that things happen for a reason. Not trying to get too spiritual here - but I think I have accepted "reincarnation" as a valid concept. Since no one can ever proves this one way or another, it's not much of a gamble, but I as I get "older," (and by older, all I mean is that I have more than one set of friends, have lived in more than one place...) I can already divy my life up into segments that might as well qualify as other lifetimes or other realities. Memory is just slapped together vignettes from times, places, and people removed from the here and now. Even when I think about my childhood, that might as well have been another person - a person who I don't resemble now (in both mind and body) and maybe one could find some overlapping themes or commonalities with my life now and this character of twenty years ago - but no one could argue that it was all really the same. If you were to say we are the same birth to death, how do you explain forgetting? If life were singular and continious, it shouldn't be spotty, missing sections, or hidden and repressed. Partly, it is a question of consistency from one life to the next - hopefully we take the lessons with us, but I guess some souls get stuck in the karmatic spiralling cycle longer than others, is that really any different from people who make the same mistakes in this life over, and over again?
In times like these, it is best not to remember New York with the perfectly casted friends, jobs, energy, and enchanting newness of my first summer there. Rather, I guess I need to think of it as exhaustive, sticky hot, expensive and just way too "on" without an escape hatch. This has to be a time for understanding that learning sometime bears a hefty pricetag, which in this case includes moving away, going it alone, in addition to hard work, sacrifice, and concentration. This is my choice, and unlike going to college which was pretty much a given and place wasn't a mystery, and I just hope I know what I am getting myself into and what it is going to mean. To feel an even bigger weight, I just hope I understand the magnitude of this decision, which, of course, I do not. Yeah, this is all very melodramatic, but this is why you shouldn't watch a movie that makes you cry, come and check your email, and blog after midnight. It's like feeding gremlins or getting them wet - one sure fire recipe for disaster.
posted by lmjasinski at 11:30 PM
