I’ve got the disease known as GOSPLAC dementia. It’s what happens when you send broke kids from broke families to play with rich kids for most of their school lives and then set them out in the real world where they have to make ends meet.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about being dramatic and walking away from my job because I don’t feel challenged enough. Though I can (and do) go there wearing whatever t-shirt/sweater and jeans that didn’t look too dirty in the morning rush, I can sit and listen to my Zen all day and be as anti-social I want to be, and the pay while not i-banker awesome is considerably better than any shitty publishing job I probably want. At least weekly I tell Jay-V and PrincessNella that I just want to walk out and never look back. And then I come to my senses and urge myself to stop smoking that shit and to just suck it up and deal because there’s a lot of people out there who can’t even consider something so ridiculous and bourgeois because if they don’t work, they don’t eat.
And then I kick myself because I’m one of those people too and I’ve always had the bad habit of forgetting that. What the hell is wrong with me? I’ve been working since I was 15 and have no savings. I rarely if ever pay more than $70 for sneakers and I haven’t bought a new pair since last summer. All my clothes come from Old Navy or H&M. The reason I wear my hair natural is because I really can’t afford the money pit of being someone who literally does not know how to do all those super girly things (you know like keeping it from looking like you’ve been electrocuted and stuff) to their hair. I’ve got over $40,000 in student loans. I’m still paying off the three credit cards I maxed out and “forgot” about in my early days of school. My share of the rent plus utilities and food is more than half of what I make a month. Rooting out parties I can go to free or damned near isn’t just me being a social butterfly or whatever but because I can’t afford to go out otherwise. If I quit my job with no net, I’ll be ruined within the month. And who’s going to bail me out? My parents? Yeah right. They’ve got money problems of their own. If I don’t work, I can’t survive.
In a financial sense, it was stupid to even strike out and get the place, but there’s a serious part of me that would rather be poor with a place (mostly) of my own than how I was in Queens, relatively flush for a crappy money handler but having to be bound to someone else’s location choice and rules. I worry about money a lot — no nightmares of bankrupcy…yet — but like Jay-V said to me earlier, it’s better than feeling like a kid pretending to be an adult like I did at home. Obviously, I didn’t need to go to LA or Miami because I just spent money that could go to bills, but sometimes it’s just good for the soul to say “fuck it, it’ll be tight for a min afterwards but I work hard, I deserve this!” Sometimes I just get so sick of having to be so on the grind that I have to splurge on a carrot to make life worth living, i.e. the Zen. And that may still be ultra bourgeois of me, but it is what it is.
It’s tough being raised knowing that you can’t fuck around with your money because there’s always someone to pay and at the same time being around people who are so carefree about it. I simultaneously envy and don’t understand people like Alex and Farmer (who just took a trip to Cuba on a whim!). They’re both flitting around foreign countries all relaxed, hardly even working, ultra blase about coming in and out of the States and I can’t even wrap my brain around being free enough here to go abroad. Sometimes I get really bitter and mutter under my breath that if I was a white man I could not give a fuck and do what I want too, but it’s more than that. I just feel like my hands are tied and I know it’s because the system is set up that way.
Ironically enough, one of the last classes I took at Wes was about this. It’s sad and more than a little ironic that they don’t teach it anymore.