Category: Writing

Why I Haven’t Been Blogging

Betty1 Comment

The irony of course, is that I’ve never blogged as little as during the past year and a half, when I’ve been in a writing program. My most “bloggy” years, 2011-2013, were those during which I (mostly) worked and took the odd trip here and there.

I haven’t blogged lately for a variety of reasons: my course and thus reading load is quite heavy, and when I read a lot, all I want to do is share great passages of great books – but this doesn’t make for very interesting posts (even though a part of me is like, “F*** popular taste! I write for me!”) Also, as I’ve mentioned before, my thesis is due this year. I signed up for the March 2nd submission date but given the current state of things, that’s not going to happen and I’ll have to turn in in August. I explained this to my parents the other day, worried they would be worried that I wasn’t graduating “on time,” and that I was going to pull another Betty (complain that “it’s hard, just too hard,” and drop out). But no, my dropping out of school days are over. Technically I’m not graduating on time – I’ll be walking May 2015 (or just sitting at home waiting for my diploma in the mail because graduations are dreadfully dull) – but I (or my parents) won’t have to pay extra tuition or be unable to take on a full time job. My parents were okay with it – never mind that they sort of have to be. Or maybe they didn’t quite understand but they hoped I understood that I was now an adult who could make my own decisions but would be careful not to embarrass them. Gotcha, mom and dad.

So…working. “The real world.” Hustlin’. Making (not) bank.

Everyone’s been asking me, “So what are you thinking about doing after graduation?” I shrug and say, “Oh you know, probably marketing or event planning or…” and here my voice trails off because I’m not really sure – those people who are sure are annoying – but then I sit up straight and say, “I am however, quite certain I don’t want to do something that will involve me writing from 9-5, or from 10-6 or whatever.”

Surprised? Me too, at first. But from my short and motley work history, I’ve learned I want stuff to write about, not to write about stuff. This means I’ll be veering away from copywriting (though it depends on industry, I guess) and any situation where I’ll be asked to churn out blog posts and/or email newsletters. I’m not saying, “No way José!” But I just know I’d rather not. Those jobs usually lead to me coming home too tired to stare at my blog, never mind write in it. The fact is I like my blog. I want it to grow with me (or plateau or get content or whatever else I decide to do). I’d like to keep contributing to it in a meaningful way without feeling like I’m pulling my own creative teeth out.

My most interesting jobs have not been ones that require me to do a lot of writing or editing or copywriting. They’re always in something I never thought I’d be doing – like being an Executive Assistant or packing boxes and reorganizing the freezers as a seasonal worker at Costco – but while I was working these odd jobs (there’s that phrase you see on the back of every best-selling paperback: “So-and-So spent many years working odd jobs, all the while writing this runaway bestseller between 1-6AM every morning..” Except this is me writing it in my own blog) I met so many interesting people and did so many eyebrow-raising things, like the time I had to move my bosses; stuff from one suite at the Wynn Las Vegas to another on a higher floor with a better view. I had to repack their bags and learned what kind of underwear they wore. Yeah I complained about the work, but I had a good time living it, and would always have an even better time writing it.

That’s what I’ve been thinking about.

I’ve also been thinking of how easy it is to be crushed by ideas. Mostly ideas for stuff I want to write and feeling like the narrator in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, where she feels she has the whole world dangling above her in the form of a fruit tree but she can’t decide which fruit to pick and eat first, and eventually they all shrivel up and fall to the ground. When I read this five, ten years ago I remember thinking “Don’t let the fruit shrivel!” And now, I’m not sure I’ve picked any fruit yet, but they are looking rather overripe. A few have probably already dropped to the ground.

Yeah, don’t read that if you feel like you are young and have options but are extremely indecisive. Or maybe read it and serendipitously, walk past the Nike logo and think, “Just do it.”

The Perks of Keeping a Diary and Blogging

BettyLeave a comment

Lately, I have not been feeling like myself. But then I wonder, what is “myself?”

A few nights ago at dinner, Tom said to me, “You are cheerier than usual.”

I looked at him over the flame of a small votive candle. 
“Am I normally not?” though this was a dangerous question and one I did not want him to answer honestly.

This last month, perhaps longer, has been trying. I have cried more than anyone in my situation (a good relationship, making slow but certain progress in school, surrounded by friends, most of whom I met through Tom, and with kind, patient parents who came to visit and found my boyfriend charming if not the city) ought to, for reasons both big and small and sometimes, for no (apparent) reason at all. I have started fights at midnight and made both of us bleary eyed with exhaustion. 

Tom shook his head, “No, you’re usually pretty cheery -” he paused – “You’re always cheery. But tonight you’re super cheery.” 
I was indeed cheery that night – we were having a pizza date in the East Village – and the night before. For two days a certain peace had washed over me – I had, I thought, accepted things that I was either to accept or reject.
I was cheery too, yesterday, when we, along with two friends, drove an hour to the New Jersey countryside to do east coast fall things: a brisk hike through a crisp, golden forest, a small lunch of cider hotdogs and doughnuts, and a corn maze through which we entered and hours later – chilled, exhausted but triumphant – emerged. 
Some days, when outings are planned and the weather is fine and there is nothing to do really, but move your legs and breathe the air and listen and add to the chatter, it is easy to be cheery. But by the day’s end, you are tired and one misinterpreted word from your lover’s mouth can push your fatigue into a darker mood.

I over think things. I know this. But by now, at the age of twenty-eight and having gone through what I think, what I hope, are similar times, I should know now how to tell the difference between my mood in a time of change and uncertainty versus my general temperament. I wonder if it’s something physiological. Some chemistry I don’t quite understand but which I try to temper by taking fish oils and Vitamin C and making sure I get enough sun on my face and skin and eyes… But nothing. In short, I should know the answer to, “Is this how I am?” or “Is this how I am right now?” 

——-
This morning I struggled for the answer while zoning out in lecture. I thought about the diaries I’d written when I was younger and when, I assume, I was “happier.” Happier in that I didn’t think so much, didn’t plague myself with thoughts about the future, which won’t reveal itself anyway, not it’s full face and shape, until it arrives. I looked forward to things most children looked forward to: the weekends, or more specifically, the hours after Chinese school. I relished warm Thursday afternoons in early summer, when I’d finished my homework and there was nothing left to do but climb the tree outside my window, then swim, and eat dinner. Maybe, if my mother allowed, I would watch some television. I counted down the days to winter break ski holidays with my cousins, and Christmas and Thanksgiving and Halloween! I’d anticipate the end of the year at the start of fall, and allow my excitement to build backwards. 
When I was sixteen a particularly nasty mood hit me – a petulant, tyrannical dark cloud that screamed, “out with the old Betty and in with the new!” – because back then, I used diaries as an attempt to reinvent myself, to just myself – and I threw those diaries away. 
I have no written record of what life was like before that age. It makes me sad to think that I might be writing over words I’d written before, on some ream of recycled paper I bought from Staples. 
Shortly thereafter, I started my first blog. A Xanga. I wrote in it for a few years before another mood struck and I began a new Xanga. Another mood, another time. A few years after that, something changed again, and I was on Blogger, as Very Highbrow, to which I am still faithful and intend to keep. 
Some things don’t change, as much as I would like them to – not because they can’t, but because they shouldn’t. But from time to time I want to reread my old stuff, revisit the old me, because the old me is always, still me. 
I remembered the password to my old archives for my second Xanga, but could not for the life of me remember the first. Xanga, now defunct, had archived all my old entries, but I could not access them with neither the password nor the email I had used over ten years ago. I have tried at least twice a year for the past three years to remember or retrieve that password, but the archives remained infuriatingly out of reach: just a small password box in the way. 
And then in class today, zoning out, I heard my professor say a few familiar words, among them, my old password sans the numbers I attach to the end of most password. I sat up, startled.  
I opened my computer and a few minutes later, voilà: Betty at sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. Betty from a decade ago downloaded onto present Betty’s computer in five seconds flat. 
Just a few pages of code but several hundred thousand words explaining, exploring. A person growing. 

Writing the City: A New York Diary

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On a whim, my professor changed the final assignment.

We were reading “What I saw” by Joseph Roth and thumbing the pages during our class discussion, he revisited something valuable. 
“Why not let’s do this,” he said, waving his hands as though to stir up the proposal still taking shape in his head, “Yes, yes, this is much better than the original assignment I have planned.” 
It’s simple: keep a journal. An urban diary of life – your life – in the city. Write it longhand if you wish, and for God’s sake don’t agonize over it. That’s what workshop is for. Try to write every day and at the end of the semester, turn in your best, your favorite 1500 words. 
A few of us groaned. More writing on top of the twenty to thirty pages we were already expected to churn out each week for our thesis workshops. Also, we haven’t been asked to keep a journal since elementary school… 

“Dear Diary, 

Today at recess I kicked a girl in the stomach...” 
A girl from Egypt raised her hand. She is a journalism student with a concentration on arts reporting. What was the original assignment? 
The professor looked at her with a curious expression that said, “Does it matter?” 
He is a curious man with wild salt and pepper hair and a chin that protrudes slightly more than the rest of his face. He is well-dressed in a New York not-quite-young but not-quite-old professorial way: fitted, faded jeans, blazer, worn but probably expensive polo shirt in dark blues and greys. Sometimes he wears a narrow, striped scarf, the kind that makes me wonder: “Yes but…does it keep the neck warm?” It certainly does nothing to tamper the scratchiness of his voice. 
On his narrow nose rests narrow black framed glasses and always at his ankles sits a single, slim briefcase, probably hand-stitched, the leather on the handles worn as well as the bottom, from being placed then picked up on classroom and subway floors. He wears no wedding ring, though he is reasonably handsome and reasonably successful, and it is only after our third or fourth class that I go home and Google him – he’s written two memoirs, one about his daughter’s mental illness and another about his struggles as a writer. 
I once saw him reading on the subway, sitting between a fat black woman and a student not unlike myself, a young Asian woman with hair pulled back into a pony tail, wearing a light sweater and jeans, flats. She was reading a printout, dense with text. My professor, the briefcase now between his ankles, read a slim volume I couldn’t see the title of but was certain it wasn’t something he’d assigned for our class. 
I stood half a car away and wondered if I should walk over to say hello – there was space in front of him – but decided to stay put because I felt it would be awkward to tower over him, my belly in his face trying to make small talk. I guessed he would get off the train at 96th and transfer to an express train – the 2 or 3 to Brooklyn where I swore he lived. I wanted to know where he lived so I could pat myself on the back and say my assumptions were right. 
But he remained seated and I, disappointed, got off. I remembered what he’d said in class. 
“When you write this diary, see if you can put your assumptions away.” 
I pushed through the turnstile, momentarily jostled by a group of young musicians and their sleek instruments made unwieldy by nylon cases and hard shells, and wondered if for me, that was possible.  

Writing Love Letters in the Modern Age

Betty1 Comment

As I write this, POI, in London for work, is reading a long email I wrote him late last night.

“I’m assuming you’ll read this in the morning, hence the subject line – and indeed the sun should be showing her face in your part of the world soon.”

“You call everything ‘her’,” he texts, “I don’t think the sun is so equipped.” 

I type a single question mark and wait patiently for the wiseacre remark, sure to come. 

“No sungina,” he responds. 

My mother would call this, “Playing piano to a cow.” 

———
Nearly a year ago,  POI and I had our fifth date. We had dinner, then went back to his apartment where I met the rest of his roommates and visited the rooftop. It was the second New York rooftop I’d visited thus far – the first had been a swanky lounge/club called PhD to which POI invited me on our second date.

“Meet some peeps,” he had said, when really he meant nearly twenty of his closest friends in New York City.

“Will they let me in if I only have my bachelor’s?” I joked.

We were texting, but he had slapped his head, groaned. A few months later he would bring it up again and I smiled, knowing I had crafted a really good terrible joke.

We said goodbye a few days later, the fifth date. What is this obsession with numbering the dates, you wonder. Not an obsession – just a statement of what to me, seemed at the time to be crucial facts. Prior to POI I had never gone on more than three dates with anyone.

So that night, to be walking by the giant post office on 8th Ave., a massive reminder of a dying art – seemed a marvel in itself. We strolled alongside the steps and I recall thinking how odd and quiet that street was. I felt too, a light feeling – it’s called “hope,” I think. I thought about his rooftop from where the bright red sign of the New Yorker hotel could be seen.

I could, I said to him, not would – could – write to him when he was in London. But of course I would.

“I haven’t written a letter in…probably twenty years,” he said.

This was the expected answer. I was already doing that thing where I lowered expectations because I was beginning to like someone.

“I’ll write,” I offered, “You email.”

“No no,” he said, “I can pop out a few letters,” (or something to that effect).

A few days later he left. As he was boarding the plane, I sat at my desk – my large white New York desk, still relatively unused – and wrote a few, carefully balanced lines to him on a hideous New York post card I’d bought at a tourist shop. Uncharacteristically, I added a feminine touch and sprayed it with perfume (though looking back this step was unnecessary and most likely exacerbated the myriads of odors – especially that emitted by the crazy crazy homeless man who hangs around the particular letterbox – that were sure to infuse the postcard along its journey). I mailed it that same hour, before his feet even touched British land.

It’s in his possession now, perched precariously at the edge of his dresser along with the rest of my notecards and letters, sent steadily over the four months he lived in London. There are letter-pressed New York greeting cards with a few lines – “I miss you! See you soon!” – and stuck in between, multi-pagers on lined notebook paper, some written in cafes, others in spurts during tedious lectures and seminars- “I am sitting in my Spy Novel class and some girl is droning on and on about feminism. The professor is trying very hard to look engaged….” etc. etc. Even when I write, I like to hear myself talk. But that’s beside the point.

He never wrote me back – not longhand – but there were phone calls, text messages and short, practical emails, mostly logistics regarding my trips to London. Though once, when I had not heard from him via text or email for two days and despaired that his affections were waning, I found in my inbox later that night a sonnet written to near perfect iambic pentameter.

It was one of those things; you’re supposed to read it quietly and go to bed with a wan, wide smile while keeping certain cards close to your chest – but I told him immediately that I was speechless. Which, if you think of it, is an outright lie.

Edward Hopper,  “Hotel Room”   1931 Oil on Canvas 

Despite his never writing back, despite his never responding outright to anything I wrote in my letters (this is fine because I don’t ask questions in my letters. I show and tell), not once did I suspect him of casting my lengthy epistles aside (as some of my best friends have admitted to doing so). This is the modern letter writer’s entitled presumption. Like psychopaths and greasers, we are an uncommon breed (says the blogger too). A handwritten note is not only rare, it’s more thoughtful; to write by hand is to use a different part of the brain, a part closer to the heart. Thus to receive a handwritten letter, when the writer in question could very well be writing other things to other people… that’s equivalent to saying, You’re welcome. I made you feel special. 

But that’s not why I did it. For the most part – and accomplished letter writers adhere to this rule lest we waste precious time and costly, fancy stationery: know your audience. I knew POI to be a reader. And I knew him to be “into me,” as the lingo goes.

———-

When I visited London, I saw that he had propped the greeting cards up on a shelf. I asked where he kept the letters.

“The ten pagers?”

I laughed.

He pulled open his bedside drawer. I saw them there, scattered like old friends at a slumber party.

“What did you think,” I said, “‘Whoa this Betty blathers on and on?'”

“No,” he said. We were not there yet – the stage of being honest. “I mean, you can get really serious sometimes (POI code for ‘sappy’) but some parts of certain letters were pretty funny.”

He sat down at the edge of the bed to look for the excerpts and I left the room – not because I wasn’t interested but because the “replies” I was looking for I found. He had kept my letters.

———-
“Letters are just pieces of paper. Burn them and what stays in your heart will stay; keep them, and what vanishes will vanish.” 

                                                   –Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood 

What is Good Writing? Brian Doyle on the Heart

BettyLeave a comment

So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one in the end – not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of the child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman’s second glance, a child’s apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words I have something to tell you, a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother’s paper ancient hand in the thicket of your hair, the memory of your father’s voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.” 

– Bryan Doyle, “Joyas Volardores,” The American Scholar, Autumn 2004

MFA Dispatch

BettyLeave a comment

In a half hour I’ll meet with my workshop professor, the one who had called some of my writing a “trick,” but who, when I met with him a few weeks ago, was also curious to know where I wanted the writing to go.

It changes week by week, but last week I turned in something about high school, attempting to answer the main questions people have for me every time I write about relationships, both mine and others’.

Mostly, “Why were you single for so long?”

Not that weird. It’s a combination of things. Timing. Family background. Pop culture and media. Traveling. Being stuck up and unapproachable. Being too self-deprecating and available. Or spending too much time obsessing with people who are either a.) unavailable or b.) unavailable, though perhaps not in the conventional way.

Anyway. I wrote it not feeling completely inspired but thinking, “Okay, let’s get all this down and lift out the usable parts later,” because Monday, when my workshops are, always roll around faster than I expect. I titled it, “Why I was Single For So Long,” mostly because I couldn’t think of anything better.

The result was not really a result, but the mere first step in a long process. For as long as I’ve been writing, it amazes me how little I know about the writing process – about the energy and investment it takes to not just write something – long, short, in between – but to see it through, in all its permutations until it’s complete. And then you realize, it’s never complete. But it can be comfortable.

I submitted it and some people liked some parts, were confused by others, but in general, they wanted more, which is a good sign. I even made some of them laugh. The professor wrote very few comments on the back of the paper, which in general is a good sign coming from him.

“I’m delighted to see you diving into this material,” he said, “Proceed!”

So now I’ll meet with him and discuss coming attractions. Goal setting, all that stuff I love reading about but never implement in my life.

Writers, Copywriters 2

BettyLeave a comment
Fifth Avenue Bridge  Martin Lewis  1928. Drypoint. 

My coworkers were so different from my classmates. I thought about my workshop from last semester – a group of misfits who oddly enough, when arranged together around rectangular tables in a small classroom, seemed to fit perfectly together. There was the failed actress turned sex columnist; the former (and probably current) meth/crack/heroine addict, the spastic magazine writer with an unidentified eating disorder; the pretty but awkward Brazilian sportswriter who’d slowly gone in a downward spiral until she underwent gastric bypass and discovered that she was actually a genius and joined MENSA (“You know what we do in MENSA?” she said to me over lunch one day, “We compare medications.”)

There was the old woman who sat defensively with her shoulders hunched nearly to her ears and whose hair was so dry I feared it would burst into flames at the slightest friction. I detested her at first because her first essay sucked, and then I sort-of-kind-of reluctantly admired because she took the writing teacher’s advice and made it much better when it was workshopped again. There was the Indian girl who had, back in India, been in an abusive relationship. She had fought with her parents until they agreed to let her come study in the States and was now, according to Facebook at least, in a loving same-sex relationship. And there was the professor, in her late thirties and beautiful in a devil-may-care way and slightly aloof. A winning combination for any professor or woman, for that matter. Everything about her I learned from the sex-columnist and other classmates who adored her and wanted very much to take another workshop with her, though I felt distanced from her, partly because she didn’t seem, most of the time, to want to be in the classroom. She was an adjunct and had another real, full-time job as the editor of an online magazine. I went to visit her once at her office and we had a short conversation (“I’d like you to speak up more in class,” she said. I nodded. “Anything else?” I shook my head. “Okay then.”) before it became clear that she had to get back to work, real work. The kind that paid the bills. 

And there were my counterparts – the girls like and unlike me – who had grown up in loving suburban families, who had never done drugs (until they did finally do drugs), who had held a string of odd part-time jobs (strip club waitress, 9/11 archivist, Costco cashier assistant), who had traveled and who wanted to continue traveling but who, at the same time, wanted some sort of internal anchor to keep us centered even when we were in the air. We could write well about a few things, but weren’t sure in the long run if that’s what we could do without running out of words or energy.

Suddenly, with birthday pizza on my lap in the copy room of Company X, I felt like I was in class again – Introduction to Real Life…?– surrounded by the corpses of English majors past that had now been repurposed into living breathing copywriters, all dressed almost exclusively in Madewell and J. Crew (the higher up you are the more full-priced items you can buy!). I got a weird sinking feeling that I and my thrift-store wearing, Brooklyn-living (except I live in the Upper West Side), part-time job-holding, chain-smoking classmates were fooling ourselves in thinking that writing for ourselves could somehow bring us the emotional and material life we wanted. It seemed that these girls, even that damned playwright who seemed to fit in so well despite his side job (though seriously, which job did he consider his “side” job?) must have, at some point, had similar dreams. Until the morning they woke up and turned uncomfortably onto their sides, seeing through the open window, “Oh! Reality.”

I wasn’t depressed, not quite, not yet, but I left the office feeling like a new cog in a giant, though much more fashionable, start-up-ish wheel. It didn’t help either that the walk home that night was bone-chillingly cold. The sounds of the street, usually welcoming after spending an entire day cooped up in my studio, seemed abrasive. I was now one of the hundred thousand people walking home from a tiring day at work. The wind hit my cheeks in sharp, icy slaps. I wasn’t underdressed, but was cold to begin with because I had sat and sat, staring at painfully cheery copy until my innards froze from physical inactivity and my right hand, on the mouse, had turned blue as it usually does when I leave it in that position. The light above my work desk had gone out so my corner had been a monotonous grey except for the blinding glow of the computer screen. 

I frowned about these things as I went down into the subway. I frowned as I stood waiting with other people just getting off work, most of them also frowning or bearing no expression at all. In the subway, a man played Spanish guitar and several people frowned a little less as they walked by, deciding after a few steps to return and drop a dollar or two in his open guitar case. On the train, I frowned as I was shoved to the left side doors, then to the right side doors, then towards the middle of the car. I frowned too, when a dirty old homeless black man boarded and began to sing, “I’ve got sunshine on a cloudy day,” informing us that he was in fact, “singing for supper.” I looked away, still frowning. When he left for the next car, I looked at the young men and women and at the not-so-young men and women around me, most of them tired, all of them trying to make a living in various fields. I guessed that most too, had more responsibilities than I, to children, to wives, husbands and parents. To themselves.

I wasn’t being fair. I didn’t have to be, but I ought to try. Especially with former English majors who had read the same books I read, loved the same authors and poets and used, when they could, the same language. Their jobs didn’t define them anymore than an MFA would define me, than the sour smell of the homeless man defined him. They had merely gone a different way and I was passing through, looking. 

I stopped frowning, but I didn’t smile either. I was dreading the stairs up to my apartment. I held my keys ready as I came out from underground and walked passed the two bums, one of whom was already fast asleep, himself undoubtedly having gone through a trying day and the other still “working,” though he shivering, stomped his feet and blew onto his hands. His gloves were thin and filled with holes. His sign was crumpled, but I could make out the two words that seem to appear in every homeless man’s message: “Help…God.”

“I get it, God,” I thought, looking up, “I get it.”

In the dark chilly skies above my warm apartment, God shrugged. He hadn’t said anything. 

Writers, Copywriters

BettyLeave a comment

On my second day at work, we celebrated my supervisor’s birthday. She’s a tall, quiet vegetarian, a year younger than I and was one of the two who interviewed me. On screen she’d reminded me of certain British actresses, pretty in that romantic English rose way (though she’s from Vermont), with bright eyes, dark lashes, flushed freckled cheeks, thick brows and curly hair that she keeps in a low, messy but elegant bun. She’s slightly more expressive over our office instant messenger than in person, but only slightly. She’s very polite. Wears chunky sweaters and jeans, worn boots, simple jewelry. Her legs are strong and I wonder if she took horse-riding lessons when she was younger, or if she still does. She’s from a good, probably privileged family, but I’m guessing her father is a stern man who doesn’t believe in treating his daughters like princesses. When she sits, she keeps her hands folded between her legs and rubs one thumb with the other. One gets the feeling that she’s waiting for something better – a better job, a better guy – but also that she doesn’t know what she’s waiting for. One gets the feeling that she is, at her core, a very patient young woman.

At noon, the smell of cheese and tomato sauce filled the cold air of the copy room and in unison, a handful of girls yelled, “Surprise!” I turned around to find that a few senior girls from the copy team had ordered pizza, beer and Ben and Jerry’s and had quietly arranged it all over a giant round table in the center of the room. We pulled our chairs up around it and ate with plates on our laps.

“Any fun birthday plans?” we asked the birthday girl. She shrugged, her face flushing. She embarrasses easily. 

“Just dinner with my parents,” she said softly.

“How’s it feel to be 26?” asked a 24-year old. 

The girl groaned, as though she had been thinking all morning how to answer, “I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head, “It feels the same.” 

“It’s all downhill from here,” someone said jokingly, and the half of the room that was older than 26 (but only slightly) turned to glare. 

A few of the girls began inane conversations about old jobs, of which there had been just one or two, or none at all. I’m one of four new hires and on the older side of the copy team – 27 going on 28 – while most of the other proofreaders are 24, 25 and one new hire being just 23. 23 is the only black girl in the copy room (and so far, the only black girl I’ve seen in the company). She is exceedingly bubbly and, despite her obvious hurry to accumulate the markers of adulthood, seems childish compared to the more reserved, reticent copywriters. For one thing she joked twice in one morning about needing coffee (“Sooo much coffee. It’s so bad, I know. So bad,”) though she was just drinking it because she imagined real adults did so. She was clearly still running smoothly on the fumes of youth. She started working a week before I started; not long enough yet to tire of her commute from her parents house in Westchester County, which is about an hour and twenty minutes by train, her last transfer being the one, the same line I take to get downtown. Though judging by how fresh faced 23 seemed coming out of the subway station compared to my morning death mask (and my commute was only half the time of hers) I felt she could and would handle it for as long as necessary.

On my second morning we had exited the subway station together and I said hello at the crosswalk. She tugged out her headphones and smiled, “Oh hey!” and we walked into the building together. In the elevator she learned that I lived on my own in the Upper West Side.

“That is so cool,” she said, clasping her hands together, “My goal is to move out and have my own place in the city by 2015. I wanna move out here so baaaad.”

23 loves the job more than it will love her back – genuinely friendly people, according to disenchanted employees on the company’s GlassDoor profile, don’t make it far at Company X’s New York office, which is run at all levels by competitive, high achieving and mostly female staff– but 23 is well, 23. She’s starry-eyed. Optimistic. All the things a 23-year old should be. And she’s especially enthusiastic about the company’s perks, which include a gleaming kitchen filled with healthy, organic free-for-alls, unlimited soda, fresh fruit, tubs of Greek yogurt, a beer tap (yes, you heard that right. A beer tap. On my first day I filled a mug thinking it was hot water. “It’s beer,” someone said. I nodded, looking into the foam and then quickly dumped it), bagel Fridays followed by a weekly company-sponsored happy hour, discounts to high end gyms and team outings and plenty more – though admittedly, my gluttonous self is happy about these things too.

At the birthday lunch 23 was the most voluble and gushed about how much she was liking it so far at Company X.

“So different from my old job,” she said, telling us she’d worked at a textbook publisher, “You guys actually celebrate birthdays here and that’s awesome.”

She proceeded to share several more things about the company she found “awesome,” and I sensed the senior copywriter, the one who had probably hired twenty-three, doubt the 23-year old’s vocabulary.

No one asked me about my last job, which seemed very long ago. Instead, a few of them had heard through the grapevine that I was a grad student.  

“English?” one of them guessed.

“Creative writing,” I said. Then it occurred to me to ask, “Was everyone here an English major in college?”

They looked around at each other at first, hesitating as though I had accused them of something embarrassing, until one by one they began to nod. All the girls save for two said yes (we are all girls except for one guy, a part-time copywriter whom I can’t decide is gay or not. He’s an actor and-playwright and is currently starring in a Fifty Shades of Grey parody called “Cuff Me.”). The exceptions had studied psychology and art history (“But with an English minor,” she said with a conspiratorial smile).

I nodded, “Oh cool.”

They too thought it was “cool”, that I was studying creative writing, but I got the feeling they meant “cool” in the way things you used to want were cool, until your priorities shifted and you decided that having a stable job with health benefits and a retirement plan were cooler. I don’t blame them. Security and a sense of direction (up, up that ladder!) can be pretty cool. I sensed that to this particular, well-dressed group, being an English major and all the fleeting little hopes that came with it (wanting to be a writer, maybe getting a PhD and teaching or working as an editor at a publishing house or magazine) had fallen away as the realities of making a living anywhere (and especially in New York City) manifested. 

It was like a dress they used to love but couldn’t bear to part with, so instead they kept it in the back of the closet. They still took it out to look at from time to time but either couldn’t fit into anymore or simply had no place to wear it.