When Your Crust is Stuffed. Part 1.
Note: I wrote this seven years ago before my writing training, before my hours and years of dedication to writing. This was the first off-the-cuff post, before I worried about editing, about style, clarity, or authenticity. Looking at my young writing, I noticed a lot of exaggerations. I toned them down. But I also noticed a lot of risk-taking and a fearlessness that I admire. Isn’t it interesting visiting an old voice? I feel like I still carry her, yet I am somewhat different from her. Is it a bad thing to have tamed this voice?
This voice eventually led to internships, brief loving relationships, discoveries of writers and writing opportunities. This voice led me to pursue my passion of writing by getting an MFA and dedicating myself to the craft. I started taking myself seriously after this. This began it all.
The trolls at the library sent me a letter of rejection. Not an email. Not a phone call. Sitting on my parent’s granite counter top addressed to me from the City of Faribault was a letter. For a moment, I thought I applied to an Ivy League university, I felt regal, but then I remembered that rejections come in small packages. These women were serious. The letter emphasized the inevitable old-fashioned qualities of my hometown. In our time warp, it felt like 1998, with one working video store, which included a backroom for DVD-style pornography. Apparently, people also still believed in paper.
I threw the envelop in the trash while my mother continued to suggest other forms of employment. She kept going and going. I didn’t actually listen to her, but responded with key phrases to show I was listening. I thought, at some point you just have to be an asshole, which is the number one no-no in Southern Minnesota. I told her to leave me alone.
I was 24. Jobless. Living in my mother’s basement. I paid my rent by emptying the dehumidifiers so the carpet wouldn’t get moldy in the humid midwestern summer. Most days, I woke up at one in the afternoon, having taught children from Beijing in the middle of the night; then I drove to the local Starbucks, where I sat for 2-4 hours sipping Chai and writing real yet embellished stories by hand in a composition notebook. I googled how to be a Buzzfeed intern. I hoped to be one out of 30 applicants when it was morel like hundreds. I applied to jobs like the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis that needed someone to get coffee and answer phones, but my CV not impressive. In my cover letters, I compared my experience teaching children in Thailand to making art. I said I was adaptable because I learned how to pay my water bill without knowing the Thai language, and learned to drive a motorbike on the left side of the road. But I received more rejections, uncertain how to transfer my skills to an American office job. Internships stopped making sense to me. I was both under-qualified and over-qualified, yet straight-up qualified. My writing was funny enough, political enough, or smart enough. The local library was my last attempt in a short series of unrealistic attempts. I wasn’t going to get these jobs, but I convinced myself I was and that I, in some way, deserved them. With a false sense of pride, I collected the rejections and failures, but polished off bottles of my mother’s wine each night waiting for more to arrive.
But the night I got the rejection letter from the library, I drove from my parent’s house in the middle of nowhere to the local McDonald’s by the highway. I soothed my erratic emotions with copious amounts of food. I ordered three cookies, a McDouble, and ate my frustration. The consumption of that McDouble could go on record as the fastest in history. I think there were three bites in total.
Before the cheese and the salt and the beef, I lived in a fantasy. I imagined myself joking with moms at the reception desk, teaching elderly folks how to use an iPad. At an edgy hipster internship, I imagined wearing stylish high-waisted jeans and bright-colored patterned tops while answering important phone calls, and taking notes of conversations between producers and artists. I imagined uttering words like "juxtaposition," and "pedestrian." I imagined them saying, “Wow, you pay very close attention to detail, would you like a paid position our organization?” My expectation did not meet my reality, because truthfully, I didn’t pay attention to detail and didn’t really know how to use the word “pedestrian” appropriately.
I used to think there was a disgusting reality to early adulthood, or “adulting.” I thought my frontal lobe would fully form and I’d be afraid to do anything reckless. I thought I’d lose sense of a certain freedom. But I was two years away from a full brain. I, foolishly, still thought I could do anything if I worked hard enough. However, I began to regret my undergrad decisions. Why did I get a liberal arts degree when I could have got a lucrative career through a trade school? Was Emily Dickinson and her poetry that great? (I don’t even like Emily Dickinson, but I do fuck with Sylvia Plath). For the last three months, I considered substitute teaching, becoming a midwife, a chef, a yoga instructor, a massage therapist, and a pharmaceutical rep. There was something hot about being a corporate drone. That sexy health insurance and 401K. When I tried to apply for a job in a large corporation in some suburban office park, I remembered how much I preferred suffering for art, and I didn’t have a marketing degree.
I searched for something to settle me.
I accepted I could live with my parents forever, and searched for surprising distractions. Covered under my mother’s health insurance, I filled my schedule with optometrist appointments, dermatologist appointments, and gynecologist appointments. I practiced my comedic timing on my dentist.
“We’re gonna have to drill into that incisor,” my dentist said.
“At least buy me a drink first,” I said.
He didn’t know we were in a relationship, but we were. He was paid handsomely to laugh at any weird comment I made about his physical appearance.
“It looks perfectly healthy in there,” my gynecologist said, after she swabbed me for chlamydia and prescribed me another set of pills to keep me from having babies.
Switching from glasses to contacts required much vigor and attention, repeated appointments to solidify the correct and most comfortable prescription. I handled a week of waking up and watching Jeopardy in my underwear, as long as I could reset my energy with my optometrist and his quirky assistant Gina. Gina asked me about myself while she taught me how to maneuver contacts in and out of my eyes.
Despite my quality time spent with health professionals, and their paid company, my apathy ate me up. When there were no appointments, the only conversation I had all day was with my mother or I spoke out loud to the characters on Shameless. I contemplated what to do with my day. Was it too early to lie in my bed and watch more episodes of a binge-able series? How long could I wander around the local superstore?
One Wednesday evening, I found solace. Now Hiring. I’d seen these signs before, but thought nothing of them. There was no drive inside me. With this one, I could felt my slumbering soul wake up.
The job was delivering pizza for Pizza Hut. It paid minimum wage: $9.50.
The next day I pulled up next to the carry-out/delivery establishment. I wasn’t dressed in any professional manner. I didn’t have a resume on file. I didn’t have a cover letter, and none of that mattered because I knew I would get this job. Without any fear or doubt, I told them I wanted to fill out an application. There was no way they could say no to me. Here I was! An excellent candidate who had reliable transportation. I had enough brain cells, as well as a college degree, equipped to answer the phone, push buttons, and read a list of ingredients. They handed me a single-sided piece of paper. It took me two minutes to fill it out. Instead of begging people to see my value, I only had to write three past work experiences and a couple professional references.
I got a call the next day asking for an interview. At the interview, I was hired after a thirty-minute conversation. The offer made me feel like it was my decision.
“So what do you think?” they said. “What do you think about working here?”
I experienced minimal social interaction, so I was unsure if they were offering me a position, or if I was supposed to give them my opinion about Pizza Hut. What did I think?
I told them I would love to work at Pizza Hut, home of stuffed crust and creamy tuscan pasta.
At the end of a six-hour shift I was exhausted just slightly, I allowed myself to only watch Netflix for the rest of the night. It was a thrill when a customer screamed at me on the phone. It was an even bigger thrill when I delivered fifty dollars worth of pizza to a man with a BMW in his driveway, who didn’t tip me.
Yet, I returned daily with a positive attitude because a silly pizza job was a thousand times better than my fake business meetings at Starbucks or getting cavities filled for some human attention. At least this way, my days where I did nothing are somewhat validated. I wondered, as Americans isn’t that all we need? A job that gives us an excuse to watch six episodes of The Crown in one day?
Originally published on funnygirlsfinishlast.com on February 17th, 2018.