Dating, Death, and Being a Receptionist

In hopes of becoming better writer this year (or at least one who writes with more frequency), I've decided to take the advice of Stephen King, who in his book On Writing says, "If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” So I've been reading more. We're not talking literary classics by any means but just text, wherever I can find it. Mostly, the internet. Here are some chunks of pieces that I've read lately that popped out at me and said affirmatively, "You know exactly what I'm talking about." They were right, I did. Here are those chunks:


This is from a fun/fashion interview on Refinery29.com with Sofia Cavallo (Opening Ceremony Online Editor), and it's her response to a question about the topic of dating in New York. I feel like I've been saying this exact thing for years, so it's great to know that a smart, successful, fashion editor agrees. I feel validated on many levels.

“Ha, I’ve had so many conversations with different people on this topic. I think everyone needs to stop thinking it’s easy to find someone who is kind, insanely attractive to you, and who likes to spend their (key word:) sober time the same way you do. Not just in New York, but anywhere. The real problem is the illusion of accessibility: apps and websites like Tinder, OKC, and Match.com or whatever. Dating is theoretically available and culturally rampant (paging Carrie Bradshaw & friends), but 95% of the time you’re interviewing another potential love interest over cheap beers and giving the same spiel about what you do for a living, you could probably be having way more lolz with your actual friends somewhere else. A 100% awesome “partner,” or whatever you want to call it, is the exception, not the norm. And, you can be defeatist about it, or you can just “do you” until things fall into place, because they will. So, I vote WHO CARES and let’s just hang out with our friends, and meet their friends, and their friends’ friends, and vibe with each other till some of us fall in love.”

http://www.refinery29.com/jennifer-steele/1

From an essay in the Huffington Post titled "I Am Not My Job: Why I Left New York City" by Alecia Lynn Eberhardt... KS sent this essay to me and said "Is this you??" because it, quite frankly, could have been. It's about a woman my age who lives in my neighborhood in Brooklyn with two female roommates and works as a receptionist at a medical office. Umm... that's me. The article is about how difficult it is to be a young creative in NYC, despite the romantic ideals that inspire such a move. It's on point. This is my favorite part:

In New York, the question "what do you do?" is everywhere you turn. The cost of living means that money is a constant on the minds of the majority of residents. How much you pay in rent is not a taboo question, but rather an extremely common topic of conversation (and probably the question asked next after "what do you do?")... In a society so preoccupied with money, it makes sense that we would begin to identify others, as well as ourselves, by professions as opposed to personal interests.

In light of this, it's easy to feel like a failure if your job ("receptionist") does not match up with your ambition ("writer"). I often found myself feeling like an outcast because my job wasn't exciting, because I wasn't a "mover-and-shaker," because I wasn't fulfilling the role that many picture when they think of a "creative New Yorker" -- a role that has all but vanished here. In a community where everyone asks about what you do and no one asks about what you love, it's easy to become discouraged and uninspired. Many of us cease to think of ourselves as "artists" as our minds and our days are consumed with the tedium of the jobs we take on to afford living in New York. So what's the point?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alecia-lynn-eberhardt/my-job-doesnt-define-me_b_4520254.html

Here's a part from an actual book that I'm reading, Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking.  It's a book about the year following the death of her husband, and it. is. sad. It's sad in the way that some parts make it hard to swallow while I read, but it's told in a way that I still want to keep reading. I started to mark the parts of the text that especially resonate with me, but then I realized that I was marking everything. It all resonates. I love this next chunk because the beginning is something that I've already had to experience, and the second part is something that hope to some day. 

"It was part of what people did after a death, part of the ritual, some kind of duty. I began. I cleared a shelf on which John had stacked sweatshirts, T-shirts, the clothes he wore when we walked in Central Park in the early morning. We walked every morning. We did not always walk together because we liked different routes but we would keep the other's route in mind and intersect before we left the park. The clothes on the shelf were as familiar to me as my own."

"The Hard-Won Lessons of the Solitary Years" is the title of the Modern Love essay in the Times a few weeks ago. It's written by Sara Eckel, and I don't know this woman at all, but I feel like she wrote this just for me. She was single for most of her life, and then writes this hopeful piece about how valuable all those years were, and how she ended up exactly how she wanted to. It made me feel good about where I am and where I'm going. And that is hard to do under 1600 words.

"Most important, I’ve realized I never needed a long boyfriend résumé for the experience. In the 20 years before I met Mark, I learned a lot of hard lessons: how to be a self-respecting adult in a world that often treats single people like feckless teenagers; how to stand at cocktail parties while my friends’ in-laws asked me if I had a boyfriend; how to have warm, friendly dinners with strangers I had met online as we delicately tried to determine whether we could possibly share our lives together; and how to come home to an empty apartment after a rotten day at work.

I realize these less-than-giddy examples may conjure up those deadly words: “desperate” and “pathetic.” But I wasn’t desperate. If I had been desperate, I would have settled for a relationship I felt ambivalent about because I was afraid to be alone. Instead, I learned to relax into the open space of my quiet home and unknown future. I also learned there is a difference between feeling something unpleasant (loneliness, longing) and being something shameful.

Being a single person searching for love teaches you that not everything is under your control. You can’t control whether the person you’ve fallen for will call. You can’t force yourself to have feelings for the nice guy your best friend fixed you up with. You have no way to know whether attending this or that event — a co-worker’s art opening, a neighbor’s housewarming — will lead to the chance encounter that will forever alter your life. You simply learn to do your best, and leave it at that.

Relationships are work, but so is being single, and I became pretty good at it."

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/05/fashion/Modern-love-The-Hard-Won-Lessons-of-a-Solitary-Life.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=modernlove