This is hard!

I spent this past Sunday afternoon catching up with two old friends. Although we all live within a two-hour radius of each other, it seems our paths rarely cross. We're all busy doing our own thing and once in a blue moon, we pause to take a few hours and catch each other up on life and all its happenings.

One's married and having her first baby in less than a month's time. The other's still figuring out what exactly her post-college life will hold, what direction her career will take, and how a relationship might figure into all of those big questions. Then there's me. I have a stable relationship and, for the most part, a stable life, but I live at the ends of the earth and as Andy so nicely put it a couple weeks back when I was bemoaning where all my money disappears to: "Ada, you don't have a spending problem, you have an income problem."

We're all at different stages of our young lives, but we all shared a common consensus: this is hard!

A bloggy friend, Amanda, just launched her first e-book, The Grad Meets World Ultimate Guide to the First Year Out of College. The book's jam packed with all sorts of things I would have liked to have known during that first year out of college and it got me thinking. When I graduated back in the stone ages of 2007, I'd decided on taking a gap year and waiting out a tempestuous job market. (Surprise: it got worse!) But I found even when I decided I was done with the transient gap year, my transient days were anything but behind me.  Now, nearly five years out of college, I have yet to have a 40 h/w, 52 w/y, we pay for health insurance and sock away some that paycheck for your retirement sort of job. 

And I'm okay with this. I'm proud to have made as much progress as I have with my freelance writing and I'm happy to have a day job that keeps me in groceries, if not total sanity. Still, it's hard not to sometimes feel like there might be something else out there, lurking just out of reach, the golden key if you will to worry-free living.

Just this evening I was watching the Sex and the City episode where Trey turns to Charlotte and says, "I'm 43. When does it start being easy?"

As the three of us talked on Sunday afternoon, it became apparent, no matter what path you choose, it's no smooth sailing at age 25 and 26. And if Trey says it's still hard at 43, I think I'll believe him, even if he is a doofus. Heck, I beat it's still downright rough at 92. 

But then again, if it weren't difficult, things just might get a little dull.So here's to perseverance and holding our own during all life dishes out. No one ever said it was going to be easy. That's just a silly notion we all seem to pick up sometime during our undergraduate years.

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If you really knew me . . . .

You'd know I was homeschooled.

I know I've mentioned the fact in passing a couple times in the blog before, but here's the skinny: when I was in third grade, my parents decided they were done with public school for my brother and I and from fourth grade through high school graduation, I learned at home. The reasons why my parents decided to homeschool us aren't really worth the space or time to explain, but suffice it to say, we were probably the only family in 100-mile radius who didn't homeschool for religious reasons. Which made the whole homeschool family gatherings kind of awkward. Really, my trolls with jewels in their belly buttons are the devil's playthings and attempting to suck out my soul? Really?!

Real homeschoolers don't play with troll dolls

For the first few years my parents served as my instructors, but from middle school through to graduation, I enrolled in the North Dakota Division of Independent Study which allowed me to study in the comfort of my own bedroom. It was correspondence study, so each "semester" I was shipped textbooks and study guides. After reading assigned texts, I'd complete worksheets and write essays, then send them off to a teacher in Fargo to be graded. I really do have a high school diploma (rather than a G.E.D), from North Dakota, which was a state I'd never visited until Andy and I took a road trip out to Portland, OR, in 2009. 

Ah, beautiful North Dakota. Not a tree in sight. .  .

In the early days of homeschooling, I always figured I'd head back to public school for high school, but I was good at the independent study thing (except for, you know, math) and my mother's piano teaching business, along with plenty of extracurricular activities, kept us interacting with our peers on a regular basis. My senior year of high school, I took a college-level history course with some of my public school peers, so I figured I had a vague idea of what a typical class room setting was like before heading off to college in Fall 2003. And luckily, I had a cute new haircut to guarantee I blended right in with all of the traditionally schooled kids at college. . . .

I should have sued my stylist . . .

By the time I got my degree, my hair had grown out and the fact that I was homeschooled had become a laughable excuse for why I wasn't good at something. ("I can't do _______; I was homeschooled!") Two other people who worked on the college newspaper with me had been homeschool at some point in their lives as well and offered a sense of solidarity. I wasn't the only homeschooled jungle freak out braving the real world! The newspaper's last issue every year is traditionally a gag edition filled with fake news articles and in 2006, we published an article about socially maladjusted homeschooled kids taking over the newspaper. 

Omigosh, were those kids HOMESCHOOLED? Quick, go get them some social skills!

Now that I'm pretty firmly planted in the world as an adult, I don't spend a lot of time thinking about my homeschooling past; it has very little impact on my everyday life. And I don't really think that I missed out on anything by not having the traditional high school experience,but one look at my movie collection indicates I'm still trying to identify with the four years of life that everyone else is most trying to forget.

How else do you explain the fact that I own 10 Things I Hate About You, Save the Last Dance, Orange County, and Mean Girls, or that as of late I've become obsessed with Netflixing Glee?

"Is that what it's like?" I'll ask whoever I'm watching the particular high school movie/show with when a particularly dramatic incident occurs.

"Yeah, no so much," they'll say.

"Well, what is it really like?" I'll ask.


They shrug their shoulders. "Not like that."

That so does not answer my question.

It's looking like I'll never really know what high school's all about. So until someone wants to spell out the knitty gritty details, I'm going to keep believing it's a place where Rachel McAdams is the queen bee, where you go through a metal detector when you enter the building, where Lily Tomlin is the guidance counselor, and where people spontaneously break into song in the hallways.

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Behind the Resume

Whenever one month draws to a close and another one begins, lately the radio airwaves go haywire with the latest reports on the economy and unemployment. “Good news on the economy,” they say, every month. Never mind that they’ve been telling us “good news” about the economy for at least a year now.

It’s becoming apparent that at long last, the job outlook is truly improving. For the first time in long time, employees who needed financial security and as a result kept their noses at the grindstone much longer than they originally intended are saying “I quit,” and heading off to the greener pastures of other employment opportunities. But here we are, smack dab in the middle of graduation season and the outlook for this year’s batch of B.A.s and B.S.s is grimmer than ever. How can this be?

Well, when I was in college, just a few years ago, it had become clear that a B.A. was the new high school diploma. Then I graduated and the economy tanked. Entry level jobs, besides ever ubiquitous administrative assistant positions, all but disappeared and the batch of new grads I belonged to were told to stay in school. We could pay off that buttload of loans once the economy turned around. In just three years, as my class played the ultimate waiting game, we turned a master’s degree into the new high school diploma. And a wave of highly educated young adults with very little work experience emerged to give today’s college graduates a run for their entry-level jobs.

Anymore, we all look good on paper. As Lawrence Wetherhold said in Smart People “Students used to be passionate about literature. Now the only thing students are passionate about is getting A’s.” *gulp* Yep, guilty.

I had an ex-boyfriend accuse me of being a teacher’s pet. This wasn’t particularly true, but I did chose a major field that while extremely interesting to me, wasn’t exactly a great intellectual stretch. I worked hard in college, but I’d be lying if I said my GPA didn’t provide part of my motivation.

Still, I don’t have a master’s. When I met up with a friend in NYC in April, we both commiserated about feeling like the whole “getting a master’s is the greatest idea ever” mentality was a falsehood being shoved down our throats. “I want to see how far I can get with a B.A.” she said. Me too! And in order to outshine recent college graduates and as well as prove my three years of post-college life experience as more edifying than working towards a master’s degree, I had to write an impressive resume.

Of course, in a world of staunch job competition, we’ve all learned how to produce resumes that make us look intellectual, creative and well-rounded. When jobs are few and far between, and often not especially intellectually stimulating, we spend a lot of time bemoaning the time we’re losing to use our “skills.” But when we’ve never really used the skills our resumes allude to, the pervading sense of over-qualification in all of our resumes is perhaps our greatest fictional achievement.

Today’s young adults might think of themselves as over-qualified. But in truth, our resumes are just us groveling on the ground asking for a chance to prove ourselves.

But what do we do when our resumes land us the job we wanted?

I have a new job with more responsibility than I’ve ever had before and those icky needles of self-doubt poke around in my stomach. I wonder if I’m working hard enough. I wonder if my competency was just an allusion that I sold to myself a long time ago. I wonder just exactly how I’m going to prove myself.

Most of all, I wonder where my confident, adventurous resume persona went. That girl was really good at stuff.

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A B.A. Doesn’t Get You Out of Washing Cars

What do you do with a B.A. in English? -- Princeton, Avenue Q

The summer after I graduated from college, I worked at a canoe outfitters. I did a lot of things when I worked there, namely transporting guests to the starting points of their canoe trips and spending a lot of time in the packing room, putting together the guests’ food packs. There was a lot of cleaning involved in the job too and often times, when we were getting low on priority things to do, we were asked to clean the vans that we used to transport guests.

I feel far enough removed from the experience to safely admit that I disliked . . . . no, I abhorred washing and cleaning the vans. It just wasn’t much fun. I hated trying (and usually failing) to get all of the windows completely smudge free. I disliked crawling around the filthy floors with a Shop-Vac.

Indeed, I got pretty good at finding something else to do whenever I feared some van cleaning might be in order. I had a college degree after all. Let the lowly high school graduate (sorry Andrew) take one for the team and scrub down the vans. I didn't spend four years getting a B.A. for nothing. Heck, no was I going to make my living washing cars.

And still . . .

I have known for a while now that my car is certifiably disgusting. Still, I was waiting for the “big ah-ha” that would signal it was time to actually wash the car. When you live pretty far out of town and your driveway is gravel, it can seem pointless to wash your car: it’s just going to get dirty again. But  when I realized I was mildly embarrassed to pick up my car from the mechanic this afternoon, I knew my car was approaching a state of filth that warranted washing. 

As I approached the car, it became apparent. My car was not close to needing to be cleaned; it needed to be cleaned.

There’s been a lot of pollen in the air and what wasn’t in the air, was apparently on my car. That was kind of gross.

But the real clincher was when I realized my car so resembled a bit of nature that a bunch of diarrhea-stricken birds had decided to converge on it in the mechanic’s parking lot.

 Eureka!

The abundance of bird shite forced me to take a good hard look at the Corolla, inside and out.

A lot of the gravel driveway had migrated onto the floor.

There had been some trips to town when the coffee jumped out of the mug. (We have travel mugs, we just usually can’t find them.)

So I washed my car. And I Windexed the windows and wiped down the dusty, dusty dashboard. I vacuumed out the whole car. Of course, it really didn’t take that long.

Here’s the shiny Corolla. A bit less sparkly after the 60-mile drive home from town, but sooooo much better.

What do you do with a B.A. in English? Well, for one thing, you can wash cars.

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