This, That, and the Other

What do you do when you don't know what to do? Everything, as it turns out. 

I used to have an employee named Olga. She was in her early 50's, was a cancer survivor, and had a zest for life that was unmatched by her teenage coworkers. She worked for me in the mornings, waiting tables, and did some promotions for a winery at night and on weekends. I asked her about her work ethic, and she told me a story about her father who lived in East Germany during the Soviet occupation. "Olga," he would tell her, "the money is lying in the streets. You just have to bend down and pick it up." 

I ponder this bit of Cold War wisdom from time to time. Changing careers is rough, and it's easy to blame the economy for difficulties in the job hunt, but really it's just hard to take off the blinders and move beyond the preconceived ideas of what makes a career. The money is lying in the streets, but can we bend down far enough to see it?

My parents generation seems to have had it easy: college degrees seemed to get you jobs in those days, and open positions were apparently posted publicly. My dad and my friends' parents have mostly held the same job for most of their adult life, or at least stayed with the same company. My grandparents, on the other hand, changed jobs multiple times. Grandad Daniels, for example, was at various times an auctioneer, the owner of a bowling alley, and a floor manager at a factory. I wish he were here to give me some advice, because I relate to his life more than ever.

Right now I'm interviewing for two part-time or freelance positions. If I can get them both I'll be working five different career angles at the same time. And I'm certainly not the only one; several of my friends are renaissance workers. Carly is a waiter, editor, florist, and pet-sitter. Maya is a bartender, actress, writer, inventor, and makeup artist. Micha is a film producer, county arts manager, hat maker, standardized patient, and retail salesperson. If it all works out I'll be a bartender, personal assistant, copywriter, video editor, producer, screenwriter, and novelist.

The money is in the streets, indeed.

The Rub

Changing a career path seems to be the hallmark of the quarter life crisis. I had all these plans when I was younger, these ideas of who I would be as an adult, and most of that identity was based around my job. Changing a career for the first time is about as easy and pleasant as having a full face transplant - you have to change your perception of who you are. 

I made the choice to be an artist sometime between middle school and high school. It wasn't a sudden flash of inspiration, but a slow realization that I was a creative person and I loved expressing my imagination in the real world. In college I chose film as my primary medium, one I still adore above all others even though I now consider myself a writer first and foremost. Imagining stories and finding fun ways of sharing them has always brought me enormous joy, but never a large paycheck. Anyone might have seen it coming, anyone except me, that is. I was always cocksure and confidant, and since I had always excelled in school and college, always been in the top percentile of my class, I assumed that I would be one of the lucky ones who would "make it," as they say.

What I didn't know was that the art world worked nothing like e school world, and at rewards are not given out for hard work and skill alone. I was never good at networking, never good at bragging myself up, and never good at just inserting myself into other people's projects. I was missing some key components of creative success. I was also missing a trust fund or family in the industry, which I've found is the surest path for any artist to succeed. (I used to carry a huge chip on my shoulder about that one. Thankfully my righteous anger has cooled into a resigned sense of cynicism in the last few years.) After a failed attempt to burst into the film industry in New York, I tried desperately to find some alternative way to break in, but in this economy even the weird finds itself outsourced and outcompeted. 

Which is why, six weeks before my 29th birthday, I'm slinging booze at wealthy politicians for a living. I have one self-published novel under my belt, a stack of screenplays collecting dust, and no more than 50 Twitter followers. Now is probably the time to throw in the towel. I've known this for months, and I've been attempting to put my ducks in a row for this "career change," a term I've come to associate with the same kind of pain as being slowly crushed by a steamroller. 

Trying to be wise I chose a career that would fit my soft skills as well as offer me an opportunity for upward mobility: public relations. I'm skilled in communications, even if my best writing skills do come from describing zombies and space aliens. And ten years of bartending has certainly taught me how to cater to an audience. Maybe, I thought, if I work for a firm that specializes in restaurant clients I can slide right in. That would be perfect.

I gathered a few mentors: customers of mine who are owners or executives at public relations firms. And the message I got was that I don't have the experience... But I might be able to get an internship. For no money.

Which brings us to the rub. I've been delaying asking for an internship like the Dickens. Will I be able to pay my bills if I spend half my week working for free? No, I won't. Will I be able to get a second job? Will working two jobs and an internship break me? Will I be able to make ends meet even with such an arrangement?

It's a risk, but the logical part of my brain tells me that it's worth the reward, that I won't get anything if I don't at least try. But something in my gut keeps screaming NO EFFING WAY. The real problem isn't the risk level, it's the lack of passion. I'd take the risk for something I care about, but I still can't bring myself to really feel for this new "career" that I haven't really experienced and don't know if I'll even like.

I feel that passion for writing. While I was doing my research and updating my resume I put all my creative projects on hold. It was time to grow up, I thought, and that means that the toys go I. The closet. For weeks after I couldn't sleep. Intensely vivid dreams kept me tossing and turning and I'd wake up exhausted. My brain needed an outlet. When I finally allowed myself to write something, just a silly, rambling, free write, my sleep started returning to normal. It frightens me, to be honest, how integral the creative is to my well-being, especially because after so many years of failure I'm convinced that I'm not very good at it. 

I guess the problem is that you can't just change who you are. I can't, at any rate. But who I am just isn't propelling me into who I want to be. At least, not yet.

Workout!

Typing this blog post is somewhat difficult right now because I can barely move my arms. Seriously, it took some real effort to pick up my tablet and move it to the table to start writing. This is because I had my first workout today with my friend and new personal trainer, Manny, who is in the process of studying kinesiology, also known as the study of how the body improves itself through soul crushing torture. I get to be his guinea pig.

I had heard of boot camps before, and many of my friends will recount gruesome tales of their first workouts and how they either threw up or passed out because of them. The idea is that you go out into a park or a downtown plaza or someplace equally public and shaming and do intense calisthenic exercises until you're blue and red in the face and probably drooling because you're too tired to control your own lips. These friends tell me that this is something which, "at my age," would be good for me to do.

It wasn't as bad as they made it all seem. Sure, my arms feel like gak but overall I'm not too exhausted. Maybe it's because Manny chose to take it easy on me, or maybe my years of running gave me endurance but no strength; who knows. I did, however, get the humiliation part.

For our workout Manny chose the well-populated Lady Bird Lake running trail, which is where scores of young downtown professionals go to jog, bike, and walk their dogs. Male attire generally consists of no shirt and the shortest running shorts Lululemon has available. On one side are the beautiful young twenty year olds whose vast reserves of youth make their workouts look effortless. They're the kind who have six pack abs even though they've never done a sit up in their lives, mostly because they weigh less than a high school textbook. On the other side are the older professional men, the ones who work out ever morning at a high end spa and only run the lake to show off their hard work. Kudos to them, I say, secretly hoping I can one day afford a spa gym membership and daily wheat grass shots from whole foods.

And then there's me, the guy who has only managed to run sporadically for the last five years, busy and stressed out and probably dehydrated from too much coffee. Now, I would not say I'm unattractive; to the contrary I'm very happy with my looks in general, and I strive to maintain a healthy diet and weight (although lately strive has become the operative word). I would even go so far as to say that I'm above average in my physical appearance. But out here on the trail, compared to the other sweating, muscular, almost naked bodies all around me, I became acutely aware of every shortcoming.

"Okay," Manny said, "we'll start with shoulder push-ups."

If you've ever done Yoga, you know this as downward dog. Your hands and feet are on the ground, and your rear end is way up end the air so that your whole body makes an upside-down V shape. Then, you do push ups attempting to move only your arms. It's fairly ungraceful, made worse when you've done enough of them that your arms give way and crumple beneath you. You're cursing and struggling to will your body upwards while your butt teeters and totters in the sky. And then you notice the incredibly hot guy running beside you, the one you probably saw in the bar last week and were to nervous to approach but hoped you'd see again, and he glances at you and you realize that yes, he recognizes you too. And this, THIS would be the image he will hold of you for the rest of time. 

How Did I Get Here?

Do you remember when you were in high school and college, doing career counseling, and you had to answer the question, "where do you see yourself in ten to fifteen years?" I doubt that anyone takes those questions completely seriously. We all know that our lives aren't going to turn out looking exactly the way we expect them to. But if you were to tell my college self that six weeks before my 29th birthday my life would look like THIS, I'd probably laugh in your face.

I always thought my life would be unpredictable, but the one thing I expected for certain was that by now I'd find some kind of progress. Maybe I'd be halfway through a career, or getting married, or receiving some kind of award. Certainly not looking at my bank account and thinking that it can't be good that my whole net worth can be counted in the hundreds of dollars. And certainly not six weeks away from celebrating my thirteenth anniversary in the food service industry.

See, I was always what you'd call a "creative" type. An adventurer. I have a degree in film and a passion for travel and writing. I kinda thought that I would find myself in all sorts of unpredictable situations, and that I'd manage to get ahead by capitalizing on my charm and intelligence. A childish notion, but a romantic idea that I wholeheartedly believed in. To understand that kind of logic we have to rewind to my college years.

Scratch, that, let's rewind to childhood first.

Contrary to popular belief, I was never told that I was special. Isn't that what old people accuse my generation of? "Young people these days all think that they're special, that everyone's a winner. They think that they're entitled, it's the ME generation, etc." No, I was never told that I was a unique snowflake, I was never given an award for participation. I was, however, unique. I had a gift for literacy, consuming series of novels as a child far beyond my typical reading level. At ten I was reading Great Expectations while all my friends were marveling over Goosebumps. I excelled in school, scoring in the highest percentile in reading, math, and science. And perhaps because of this my parents never told me I was special. Instead, they told me that I could do anything I set my mind to.

I know my parents believed this, and I think they still do in spite of the evidence. There's an old platitude: "do what you love, and the money will follow," and although I don't know that this advice was ever given to me exactly, several permutations of it were soaked into my brain. My parents told me I could do whatever I set my mind to. My great-grandfather told me to do what made me happy, not what made me money. My high school councilors told me that I was smart enough that I'd be successful at whatever I chose in life. My college professors told me to follow my passions.

And my friends told me to do what I loved, and the money would follow. There it was.

I did what I loved. I earned a degree in film, paying my way through college by way of loans and a part time job working the concession stand at a movie theater. I moved to New York after college, working in a production office and on as many movie shoots as I could, and the money didn't follow me. I moved to Texas and wrote screenplays and television pilots and a novel, and the money didn't follow. I traveled to Europe and Asia and the money didn't follow me there either.

I had a moment of panic this morning when my boss told me that one of the parties I was scheduled for had cancelled. Summer means less business, and less business means less money in my pocket. And since the money in my pocket was already at an all-time low, this sent my head spinning. How would I make it? Would I need a second job? A different job? I had felt this panic before, but it made less sense today than it used to, back when I was a recent college graduate. In my mind, I've moved on, but in life it was business as usual.

I find that I am not myself. I started to google "quarter life crisis," since I was pretty sure that was what I was experiencing. On the upside, I thought, that implies that I'll live to be 120 years old. Small consolation.

This is my story, as I count down my last year in my twenties. One year, one month, and twenty days.