One Month and Ten Days

It has been one month and ten days since I graduated.  I feel disappointed.  As I think every naive graduate has done, I came out of college swinging--thinking I was going to take the world by storm.  Here is a list of the things I have done since I have been out of school:

1.) Spied on the neighbor throwing his dog's poop in my trash can.
2.) Finished 0 new essays.
3.) Drank lots of coffee.
4.) Sent a proposal to Bust Magazine.
5.) Eaten a lot of Lamb Grinders from Bar Gernika and drank a lot of Red Seal to go along with them.
6.) Made a list of goals on how to become a popular writer and make money writing.
7.) Worked
8.) Watched almost two seasons of Intervention (though I don't watch the full episodes, just the messed up parts.)
9.) Finished a couple of books.
10.) Read the book Your Stupid, Stupid Decision to Go to Grad School and laughed and gave myself an ulcer from worry.
11.) Made a list of three ideas of essays I should write.
12.) Moped and cried because I am not taking the world by storm.
13.) While moping and feeling worthless, I decided I should revamp my cafe on Zynga's CafeWorld on Facebook.  I am humiliated each day because while I know I should be writing, I am busy cooking White Radish Cake and serving Triple Berry Cheesecake, all the while wishing the cheesecake was real so I could do some emotional eating and wondering how much I would be made fun of by friends who knew I had started to play the game again.


Someone gave me a peptalk the other day about how most people think they will take the world by storm when they get out of college--I'm not an exception--and most don't.  I responded by crying and saying "But I WAAAAAANNNTTT tooooooo."

The problem is, in order to make it as a writer, you must write.  And in order to write, you must sit down, ass in chair (as that Ballenger voice says in my head) and WRITE!  But how do you write when you don't feel motivated and you feel like your life is in limbo while waiting to see if you're accepted to graduate school? And how do you write when you wake up one day and realize you've become a sniveling, entitled, whining sad-sack about it all.  And then you see something so discouraging to your psyche that you think antidepressants may be in order.

Today, I woke to find that one of my classmates is writing for a local paper.  And while I am happy one of us is doing something, I am also disheartened because this girl is also the one that in class when someone told her she had a lot of run-on sentences (this was an upper-division English class), she said she had no idea what that meant.  And she also said she had no idea what a complete sentence was.  If she knew what a complete sentence was, then I would be happier.  And if I knew she really wanted to be a writer, I would be happier.  But in class, she said something about how she didn't think the English degree was for her, and she had decided to go into nursing.  But somehow, even though writing isn't her "thing," she still got a job writing.   It makes me sound like a bitch, and I am, and I don't care.  But it also baffles me.  Maybe she got it because she tried, but I feel sort of defeated that someone like that, who can't write a complete sentence, made it in a small way.  I don't want to write hard news; I want to be funny and be a bitch and gross people out and make them laugh until they piss themselves. And maybe she put in the hard work, and in the month since we graduated, learned what a complete sentence is, so I should be happy for her.  And maybe I should stick my neck out there more because no one knows I exist behind this computer, sporting unwashed hair, going braless, wearing grubby pajamas and drinking coffee while stroking my cat.  If I take a shower, maybe then I can take a little bit of the world by storm.