The pillow and bed sheets I’m using aren’t mine. They belong
to a Spaniard whose room I’m subletting. A friend of a friend lent me the
mattress I use but not a bed frame because he wasn’t fully committed to lending
me the whole bed. He’s given me two months to find my own, but I won’t because
I’m never fully committed to staying where I am. I’m twenty-five, single, living under the poverty line, and an ex-Comparative Literature major with a 3.922 GPA no one will ever care
about. Since graduating college two years ago, I’ve been everything from a
barista to a preschool teacher. An intern blogger for a financial network to a
nude model for art classes. For a minute, I trimmed medical marijuana. I don’t
enjoy coffee, kids, being naked, finance, or marijuana. No really –– I mean it.
I’ve just had trouble making money doing what I love and do well: writing and teaching yoga. For me, unlike if I were in med school, there’s
no formula for becoming a professional.
I had my own bed at one point. I bought it for 25$ from the girl whose room I rented in the
first of four places I’ve lived since moving to Colorado. But, when I left the
second place in a hurry, I abandoned the bed and few other things I’d acquired.
Like the green blanket my boss at the coffee shop gave me when I needed an
extra layer. Isn’t it one of the
nicest things when someone offers you an extra layer? My boss was Texan and believed in chivalry, and I liked him
at first. But then he started asking me to call him Grandpa Chuck and coercing
me to drink muscle milk. He said I was losing too much weight, which can happen
when you’re broken–hearted and eating mostly red cabbage.
Back in college in Pennsylvania, my nineteen year–old
boyfriend had broken up with me when, while bowling, I told him I’d still love
him even when he went bald. And, more than baldness itself, he feared being
with the same person for so long. Honestly though, his rapidly receding
hairline suggested he didn’t have as much time as he thought before baldness.
But screw him. I gave him a box full of his mother’s pottery and moved across
the country.
So, while my friends back east went to grad school, got
married, and bought furniture, I went to Goodwill for pottery and drank Grandpa Chuck’s
muscle milk out west. First, I
lived with a fellow Jew in a condo until I spent all my money on a yoga teacher
training. I then moved into a co–op with seven hippies, four dogs, three cats,
and over thirty chickens, which lived in a coop outside my bedroom window. One
morning, I found a butcher’s knife no one could account for in the middle of
the living room floor. Another time, in an empty room, I found a homeless man
with bleached blonde dreads singing about prison. He’d been living there a
week, and nobody knew. The house smelled like hash. Every girl except for
myself got pregnant. To make kombucha, a guy used all our drinking jars. Goddamn hippies. Except for the homeless ex-convict who stole my
meds before we kicked him out, I did love them all. But I had to get out! So I
moved into a very large laundry room with three male grad students. Four months
later, I moved out and am now living somewhere else. That’s all I have to say about that.
Almost daily, friends investigate: “wait, so what are you doing now?” To several, my life is
entertainment –– a sitcom. Stay tuned! “Tell me how it ends,” one friend says
every time I meet a new guy. Occasionally, someone dares interrogate me about
my career path as if it's a yellow brick road: “what are the logical steps
you’re taking to get to where you want to be?” And this interrogation is a
yellow brick road leading to no longer being my friend. Career. It sounds like
a disease. But the very worst are those college newsletters highlighting alumni
activity and events. Fulbright Scholar Jane Church ’09, for example, has been
profiled in the Washington Post for teaching everybody in Malaysia English. A
Haverford College lawyers network inaugural reception happens on April 25th
in San Francisco. And then the updates about campus life: a new road is being
constructed behind the athletic facility. Awesome. Good to know. Lucky for me,
I’ve only received one of these newsletters; most of my mail gets lost because
I’ve never formally changed my address when I move.
Returning to the subject of the balding, teenage
ex-boyfriend. I loved him enough to have married and bought furniture with him.
(Look, he had a beard, and you’d never know he was so young if I didn’t tell
you). And he never knew it, but I wanted to live together on the coast of Maine
in a log cabin with a tin roof and woodstove. He’d be a lobsterman and musician, and I a writer and yoga
teacher. We’d have a little girl named Juniper. We’d never make it into the
alumni newsletter. Now, instead, I’m living in a ghetto apartment in the
Rockies with a roommate who aspires to make popcorn for a living. Sometimes I wear maternity clothes not because I’m pregnant or fat, but
because a friend’s friend who works at a maternity store offered me
hand-me-downs. I accepted before knowing the origin of the clothing. I only
knew when, weeks later, I discovered that the tag on my new favorite cardigan
read “motherhood.” Really?!
Simone Aliya Weisman (yes, folks, this is my real last name, and
all you ever had to do is look on my driver’s license or credit card) class of
’09, but actually ’11 because it took her six years to graduate: mostly happy
and has shit to write about. Cheers!
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