I Miss You When I Blink: Essays(16)

* * *



One evening on my way into town for a night out, I ducked away from my friends into a phone booth. I got out my emergency prepaid phone card and made the call. I told him I didn’t miss him anymore, I wouldn’t be seeing him again, it was over.

“We’ll work on things when you get home,” he replied.

“No,” I said. “No more working on it.”

As I hung up the receiver, I felt the conversation disappear down the wires into a tiny fizzling flicker of nothing. The end. Last scene. Roll credits.





Good Job


A friend of mine recently got a Roomba—one of those automated robot vacuums that cleans your house. We sat at her kitchen counter and watched it navigate the floor. It motored along in one direction, then hit a wall or the leg of a chair, spun around, and headed the other way. It zigged and zagged across the rug, bouncing off obstacles—eager and blind, purposeful and aimless at the same time.

“Look,” my friend said. “It’s like a drunk bee.”

“Or us in our twenties,” I said.



* * *



“Entropy = disorder. Time progresses, entropy in the universe increases, things fall apart.” I wrote this on page one of my notebook in my first chemistry class at Davidson, which I took because I was sure I would be heading to medical school after college. Is there any creature more confident in her future plans than a college freshman who has yet to complete a single semester?

There were more doctors in my family than any other professionals, and I understood what the physician’s path looked like—med school, residency, practice. It took that chemistry class plus a year of calculus to make me realize that wailing and gnashing teeth over molecular diagrams and indecipherable equations was not a behavior I should indulge in for several more years of schooling, and that I might not have been cut out for the mathematical aspects of life in the medical field.

English, on the other hand? Joy! Three hours writing a paper beats three hours measuring the levels of corrosive liquid in a test tube any day. I declared my major and made it my goal to graduate with high honors. Bang—done. But then?

I knew I loved to write, but to me, “writer” meant novelist, which I’d never wanted to be, or journalist, which didn’t appeal to me, what with so much boring fact-checking. As a little kid, I used to sit at breakfast, reading the back of the Cheerios box and editing it in my head to make it snappier and more interesting (“crunchy Os”—really? How ’bout “tiny whole-grain life preservers”?), yet it never occurred to me that someone did that as a profession.

I saw no point in going to grad school for English, because the goal of that path seemed to be a job as an English professor, and if there’s one thing I cannot do at all (other than maintain balance while walking down stairs in high heels or self-administer a bikini wax), it’s teach. I was once invited to guest-teach a poetry class for a day in college, during which hour I shot rapid-fire questions at the class while growing increasingly peeved at their slow response time, until one kid finally yelled, “Could you GIVE US A MINUTE?” Afterward I ducked into a stairwell and rage-cried. So, no—not teaching. Process of elimination didn’t leave me with much.

Mostly, as my friends seemed to plug along in pursuit of their postgraduation dreams, I stared terrified into the abyss, wondering if I’d be able to see my dream once my eyes adjusted to the darkness. Looking back, I realize pretty much everyone felt as lost as I did. But I didn’t know that then, and I wanted a plan of my own. I would not allow entropy.



* * *



The easiest thing for a diligent student to do is to accept an assignment. So the summer between my junior and senior years of college, I tricked the professional world into solving the problem for me by playing internship roulette. That is, rather than apply for jobs in a field in which I wanted to work, I applied to a program that matched up interns with openings. I couldn’t answer the question “What do you want to do?”—so I asked, “Well, what do you think I should do?” Show me what to want, and I’ll show you how I can get it.

I ended up being placed with an organization called Arts and Citizens, the mission of which was to raise awareness and funds for the humanities. I didn’t have the first clue as to what I would be doing, but I very much liked that out of all the applicants in the program, an employer had picked me. Plus, I knew what “arts” were, and I knew what “citizens” were, even if I didn’t really know how one might “raise awareness and funds.”

I learned a lot as an arts advocate. I learned, for example, that there are some questions you should ask in the course of the interview process. Specifically, ask the agency if all the organizations participating in the program know that they signed up for it and are actually expecting an intern to show up. You may be surprised to find that the answer is no. I don’t think my boss remembered applying for an intern, or at least didn’t expect that she’d really be granted one. She was a polite, quiet, Patagonia-fleece-wearing gal of about forty, always clutching a sheaf of ripped-open envelopes as if she’d started opening the mail and forgotten to finish, and she looked up at me in surprise every morning when I walked through her door. She was the only other person I ever saw in this internship, because—here’s another thing I learned—sometimes the term organization is used loosely to describe a one-person letter-writing effort that operates out of a storage room above a theater. The “organization” might be just one desk and one chair for that one person, a set of supply shelves containing various paper products, and an enormous, ancient computer with a black screen and a blinking green cursor and a keyboard that goes KABOING every time you hit a key. (Time to write a form letter: KABOING KABOING. KABOING KABOING KABOING.)