waitresshood and windsong
There was an article in the NY Times today about how there is a great increase in college dropouts now in their mid-twenties facing the same challenges that J and I and most of our friends face: we’re from working and middle class families who’ve dreamed big for their children and yet can’t necessarily put them through school. We’re faced with an expectation for some kind of greatness, that to aspire to mere waitresshood would squander our talents and intelligence, so we can’t be satisfied to “merely” grow up, raise a family, and grow old, that is not enough, yet we aren’t given the economic means to philander away at school without having to work too to pay for rent and food. We are told we can do anything, so we muse and agonize over this immense privilege, yet it still seems a quaint and preposterous idea that actually IN FACT we could someday find ourselves doing something other than blue-collar work for a living. The women I know are waitresses or childcare workers, the men I know are construction workers or computer desk slaves. Only recently have I met anyone successfully doing anything else, and they are exalted in the minds of everyone else as deities, almost. Oh, and as a sidenote, my brother’s going to BROWN with his 4.0 and 1600. J tells me that in a recent survey a significant number of female college dropouts drop out in conjunction with their first major love affair. This is true, of course, and discouraging. I did too, though I didn’t think of it in that way at the time. Trish tells me to pursue people who love what they're doing in my proposed area of study (currently, natural science), to follow them around and soak up some of their vibrance and see if it resonates with mine, which is a great idea, but takes some initiative and creativity, which I have now that it is summer, but summer feels so short, so limited, I feel pressure to squeeze as much as possible into this brief time that I don’t have to be in school, because god knows I won’t be able to do any of it once classes begin again in September. I hate this. In my one day off this week I wake at noon because it is raining and my bed is overly comfortable and just barely have time to clean my room and do my laundry and piece together the songbook that Stan tore to pieces two years ago and almost set on fire before it becomes too late to go for my daily run and I have to go grocery shopping and then people start arriving for the evening dinner social and so I sigh and sit on my porch railing smoking a cigarette knowing I shouldn’t and watching the rain splatter out from under the wheels of the passing cars marveling at how I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. When will I take the reins and go? And when I do, where will it be? If I could be really good at just one thing, then I could just do that thing and eventually make it. But because so many things interest and pull me, I feel always torn, and always strained one or another way, and wonder if I really have the oomph I need to really do school. I got a 4.0 this semester while working 30 hours a week, maintaining an apartment and a fledgling social life, and forging a relationship with an entirely new social network of people in a production collective in New York City: not an insignificant feat. However, I now feel an ever-stronger pull to create, and to have time for the creations to incubate, and to have time to pursue the things that fascinate me. But I also know that if I am not in school, unless I am doing something really blatantly significant, I will feel aimless and the days will slide too easily by. And it’s really easy to be so dreamy in the springtime; come January I will waste away if I have no structure from which to swing. This is also what tormented me the year I spent at college; the siren songs of places yet to see and people yet to meet and things I could be doing were too sumptuous, and I succumbed. Then instead of following the windsongs, I spent three years as a housewife in a town within walking distance of the college, because I was In Love. Argh! And now I say I wish I had a lover who would meet me, but why should I want that now? Would that not only bring ruin? I am not a cynic, and I am still willing to put myself out there into the storm to see what happens, but I AM suspicious of this desire, and wary of my weakness.