Thoughts from Places: The Post Market

I'm feeling a little bit lame of late, dear readers. Pretty much all I do is go to work, come home, fiddle with edits or try desperately to catch up on How I Met Your Mother, go to sleep, and do it all over again. Not exactly the stuff of enticing blog posts, I'm afraid.

But I do have a pretty nice job, so I thought I'd tell you some interesting observations from working in a mail room.

1. A huge percentage of people are violently averse to licking envelopes.

2. The sound system plays a Pandora station that is essentially the same twelve songs on a loop, which has led to me making up some weird harmonies to Philip Philips' "Home" to pass the time. It has also led me to be way too amused at the way Pandora censors songs. It doesn't bleep things or add a different word; the sound just cuts out. So, the line in "Some Nights" sounds like "Who the      wants to die alone?" and "I Write Sins Not Tragedies" has two: First, "oh yes, but what a shame the poor groomsbride is a     " and "I chime in haven't you people ever heard of closing the      damned door" (so you can say damned but not goddamned? Okay...).

This clearly amuses me way too much.

3. There is such a thing as an international Forever stamp. And they're ROUND. (They're globe shaped. It's cool.)

4. There are a LOT of international students at this college. From all over! As someone who's more than a little sad that she is not currently zipping around London, it's really great to talk to people sending packages to Korea and postcards to Paris.

5. I really like this job. It's not what I want to be doing for the rest of my life, of course, but I like doing it a lot, and this is why: when I finish off someone's express mail right before the postman comes to pick everything up for the day, when I tell someone that another customer has left their tape behind and so there's free tape today, when someone finds out that sending a gift is going to be less expensive than they thought, even when I just give someone a booklet of stamps, they really, really mean it when they tell me thank you.

Getting Somewhere

I'm not going to lie to you: graduating from college kind of sucks.

This summer has been a weird limbo, even though I tried so hard to avoid that very situation. But I stayed in the same place I had been in, even though most of my friends moved on, some to do very exciting and important things like the Peace Corps in Madagascar or teaching English in South Korea.

Whereas I was stuck in Ithaca, in a sublet that was filthy and uncomfortable and felt rather unsafe, with a job that, let's be fair, made me miserable. I had thought that I'd be okay at letting hotel guests vent their frustrations on me, but I wasn't. Ultimately, I left that job, deciding that struggling to get more than four hours' sleep a night was not worth it. That being treated like a failure by at least half the people who came through the hotel was not worth it.

I think that, no matter what you end up doing immediately after you graduate, you're struck with this paralyzing fear that you're doing it wrong. I had a full time job and a place to live and everything, and yet I couldn't help but feel like I'd skipped a step. Like there had to be more to it, even right away - that all the hard work I'd put into school for all those years, culminating in a bachelor's degree with highest honors, couldn't possibly put me into a job where people looked at me like I was an idiot eight hours a day unless I had, in fact, made a mistake.

So enough of that. I'm going to worry that I'm failing no matter what I do, it's just my nature. But I don't need a job to reinforce that worry so very strongly.

But now I have things to look forward to. On Saturday, I'll be moving into the real grown up person apartment my roommate and I found. It's beautiful, and it's going to be clean, and OURS in a way no place other than our flat in London, perhaps, has been yet. I'm starting a new job on Monday, which hopefully will not be quite as soul-crushing as the last one. I'm making progress on editing The Long Road Home. And my school friends, those who haven't graduated yet, will be back in Ithaca in a few weeks' time.

I have things to look forward to again. Things to be excited about. I've got an apartment to decorate the way I want it decorated. I've got a job where I (hopefully) won't have to wear a name tag and get demeaned by everyone who walks in the front door. I've got a manuscript with edits that are beginning to look manageable rather than impossibly daunting.

I'm feeling a little bit more like I can do this whole "adulthood" thing, rather than feeling like I've failed before I've even begun.

And hopefully, it'll only go up from here.

Imagining the Future is a Kind of Nostalgia

This is one of those blog posts in which I will take several paragraphs to say what John Green said in a single sentence. Looking for Alaska is not my favorite John Green novel, but the line "imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia" will never fail to pack a punch for me. Because it is so very, very true.

Nostalgia in the not-Alaska-Young-defined sense means looking back, milling over the past and wishing for its comforting certainty again. It means a longing for a kind of lost perfection that may or may not have really been there in the first place.

But you can do that with the future too. Spinning out hopes and dreams, constructing the perfect future in your head, isn't that rather like constructing the perfect past? All these things that you hope will happen - getting perfect grades, falling in love with the perfect person, finding the perfect job, getting the perfect agent or book deal - won't happen, at least, not in the same way you dream they will. Sometimes you won't get exactly the grade you want. The person you fall in love with will have his or her own flaws. Even dream jobs can drive you crazy sometimes. And getting an agent or a book deal only means there's more work and more rejection ahead.

But that's okay, I think. As long as those perfect ideals we build up in our heads don't become all-encompassing, it's okay to build them. It's okay to strive for that perfect dream.We need something to reach for, even if that thing isn't something we can ever truly catch.

I'm in a place right now where I feel like my life is made up of nostalgia, of both kinds. I'm in the last seven weeks of my undergraduate education, and soon I'll have to start acting like a real adult. Getting a job. Paying rent. Buying my own groceries. All this is both terrifying and exciting. And I'm stuck in a weird in-between space, where I'm both missing the past and longing for the future. I miss the (rather insane) confidence I had when I first started writing (probably the only thing I will ever miss about being thirteen). I miss being able to solve all my problems simply by going home. I miss London every single day - I miss the way London made me feel like I could go anywhere, be anyone, do anything; all I had to do was hop on the Tube and go.

And yet I have all these plans, plans that require me to move beyond what has already happened. I'm going to get a job. Some kind of job. Any job. One that'll pay the rent and where I can work with nice people. Hopefully that'll get the chorus "I really need this job / please God I need this job" out of my head (I am SUCH a musical theatre nerd guys). I'm going to get my own apartment with my made-of-awesome roommate. I'm going to get a kitten and call him Mr. Darcy. (Because what else does one name one's future cat, right?) I'm going to get to the other side of this querying tunnel, find an agent, sell a novel. I'm going to be a real, proper, adult-type person, one who is confident in her own skin, one who really can do whatever she wants rather than just feeling like she can.

I'm going to do all of those things. Probably not as perfectly as I imagine them - the pile of query rejections in my inbox, which is now being joined by job rejections, will attest to that. But I'm going to do them.

For now, though, I'll content myself with nostalgia, with sending off a zillion emails and hoping against hope that I can reach that unreachable star.

... More musical theatre jokes? No? Okay, I'll stop.