Click to PurchaseHey there. Just a heads up that there’s a new post hidden in our site (kept off the front page for space reasons), a brief montage I composed recapping the western swing of our tour. A no-name diner, a National Monument, missiles, and more! So go on and check it out. “PhotoJournal: Out West.” Already arrived at a home, internet theater directly in front of you.
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If you haven’t been to the audio section in a while, it’s a great time to check it out. Todd just uploaded our second batch of student confessions. We went all over the country to record students’ hopes and fears for life after college. Our makeshift, on-board audio studio provided a quiet place for students to unload their anxieties, express their excitement, and generally let us know what was on their minds as they approached graduation. There’s some great stuff there. To check it out, click on the audio tab at the top of the page, then click on So…Now What (or just click here). Finally, scroll down to the bottom of the page, choose the school whose students you want to hear, and enjoy.
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Well blog readers, I am sure you have all been on the edge of your seats wondering when the third member of the Parachute team would contribute her glorious thoughts to this internet record of our wanderings. I have been very busy being awed by all of the fascinating people I am meeting on this tour, for one thing. All y’all college students have some great thoughts. Despite not knowing what to do with ourselves, this generation is pretty determined to stay optimistic and make the world a better place, which is great. Anyhow, enough excuses – on to the part where I talk about me.
Today I will get you warmed up with a little introductory post about how I got involved with Parachute and such, and then I will rocket you into the stratosphere of my amazing thoughts with my next post musing on the overwhelming number of choices we have after graduation.
I am the poster child of Parachute’s networking method to getting a career started – knowing people is definitely how I got involved here. Basically every little break I’ve had in the career world thus far has been because I met someone kind enough to give me a boost, or because I contacted someone who went to my school and asked them for help. How did I start working at Parachute, you ask? (I know you did.) Mike and I went to school together, and we weren’t even particularly good friends at Kenyon – we never could have imagined that we’d spend weeks trying not to kill each other living on a bus. Anyhow, he knew I wasn’t up to anything much after graduation, and decided to give me a call when he needed someone for the job. Always looking for adventure, I gratefully accepted. And thus, I find myself in
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So you must be wondering why I’ve been away for so long. (Unless you think I’m just lazy.) First—for those of you who have given me the benefit of the doubt, which, by the way I’m not sure I deserve—but first, I’ll have you all know, there was the matter of the 2000+ miles we had to drive after Chicago; lots of driving, mile upon mile upon mile late at night and early in the morning, and all day long in order to reclaim California for Parachute by Wednesday evening. For those of you unaware (though I don’t know how you could have been as, after all, I am the main reporter for the trip), we left Chicago on Sunday afternoon, circa 2 pm by the time brunch was consumed, strawberries were bought, and one last twirl in and around my old hood was had…which timeline left us with 75 hours to travel from the golden prairies, over the purple mountains, and finally to that shining—yes, it was shining—sea that abuts Humboldt State University’s home. So: an average of 30 miles for every single one of those hours, and indeed we were driving for as many of them as we could safely do so….
Second, and more to today’s point, my computer died. Sigh. It was bound to happen I suppose, the average lifespan of a laptop computer in
So I took the plunge, and time swam by. It does that, time, but the real insidious part is that it does so mostly while we’re not looking. My computer aged—as did I—but the $1500 (average) cost of a replacement acted like blinders on either side of my eyes; things cropped up, moments of digital pause, but I refused to acknowledge the inevitable. My bank account was too lowly, my prospects still persistently dim. And yet time marched on.
Well, time marched my laptop right over its precipitous cliff (though I wish the fling were as spectacular as the metaphor; in the end it was just matter, as dim as my career prospects, of it not starting), and there I was last Saturday night on Dell’s website, ordering another laptop. And there I was on Sunday morning, the average price of an American laptop poorer. Oh my. Sigh.
So here you have it, ladies and gentlemen, young men and women, another life lesson: time marches on, and it sends you bills while doing it. Right now, with graduation and job searches and major life changes looming, I’m sure you’re more than familiar with time’s lockstep tendencies, but what you may not be wholly aware of is that living, at all times and in perpetuity, costs money. Even when you don’t get the bills, even when they are not on their way…they are on their way. Be prepared. Carve out your spaces, your savings accounts, be careful, eat foresight for breakfast, drink a glass of planning with your lunch. It is not being lame, it is not being grown-up, it is not a matter of abandoning the erstwhile steadfast resolutions you once held dear while breaking all the rules in high school; it is a matter of living.
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I’ve just plugged your show on my website; now will you please, please answer my phone calls. I’ve got some very serious questions that need to be answered by a pair of ebullient radio show hosts who care deeply about how to spell names. Like: why is it that just about every hundredth time we try to accelerate, the RV just won’t move no matter how much gas we give it? And why does it sound like there’s a squirrel in the glove compartment when we drive really fast? And what’s the secret code behind the highway numbers? And why does Todd like to keep the RV at a super-Saharan 89 degrees? Look, I realize that some of these are beyond your scope, but can’t you at least answer my question about the accelerator?
I have a really hard time believing that the other callers have a better angle than I do. Ask yourselves: How many of your callers are 22 years old (or even under 40, for that matter)? How many of them, at whatever age, have been entrusted to drive a forty foot bus across the country with no special training? How many of your callers will have a co-traveler and co-driver in the background screaming out his competing theories about the cause of the mechanical problem, like the ridiculous theory that it has to do with the cold even though it happens like ten minutes after we’ve already been driving? How many callers will have a thousand of their friends and blog-readers (okay, ten of their blog readers) tuning in to a show that they’ve never even heard of to listen to their buddies on the radio? How many, NPR? How many questions will it take?
Click and Clack, I’ll make you a deal. If I get a hundred people to sign a petition saying that they’ll listen to your show a million times if you’ll take my call, will you answer my questions? Or will you let me drive dangerously on with all my mechanical problems across the highways and byways of this country? Do the patriotic thing; take my call.
If that’s not a good imploring, I don’t know what is.
[Those who would like to sign my petition can do so by joining the Facebook group “Dear NPR, Put Mike on Car Talk” or by commenting on this blog. To comment, click on the title of this blog and go to the bottom of the page, then leave a reply. That’s right; I’m opening up the comments for one time only.]
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We’re in Chicago. I am, at the moment, in a Wicker Park coffee shop called Filter, the famed intersection of Milwaukee, Damen and North one tenth of a stone’s throw away (depending on the size of the stone). That is, a vibrant place, a central place, an area of much coming and going. The kind of place you’d expect to change a lot, so many people with their fickle, changing tastes, and that’s before we take into consideration the rampant hipsterism of this particular neighborhood in Chicago, the very epicenter, I once thought and still sometimes do, of the hipster movement in the United States. (Yes, a dramatic statement but also possibly true; just come here and see for yourself.)
And yet. And yet this place has been here for years, as has the currency exchange across the street, also the sushi restaurant and the two bars, the brunch place on the other side of the intersection, variety store next door, the breakfast joint beneath the El, ten or so bars up Damen, the bookstore down Milwaukee just a little ways…and on and on, no seriously: on and on and on. I know because I used to live in Chicago, just a few blocks north to be exact, I moved in the winter of 2002 and moved out in the spring of 2003. I saw a few changes, to be sure, while I was here—for instance Filter came in that summer—and by my best guess there have been a few since I left, but nothing too drastic, not really, and unless I’m mistaken there is more, much more, that has remained the same.
This is weird for me, and in its own odd way it is even more disorientating than if everything had changed. Apparently, my idea of a thriving city involves fairly constant change, new 
businesses starting every week, every month, old businesses shutting down, people making it or not making it, places accomplishing x or y or z and then moving on, done with the place. People get what they want and then move on, or else they don’t get what they came for and move on anyway (debt, eviction, or et al having its say). I grew up an hour north of New York, and perhaps this idea comes from my experiences with that city—easy and perfect ‘for instance’s being Times Square, or SoHo, or the West Village, or the near entirety of Brooklyn—but to be honest I see this happening in the small city of San Francisco, and even in the small town Williamstown, Massachusetts, where I went to school. It even happened in Brookfield, Connecticut where my mom now lives, I drove down the road that leads to her house one day and the gas station that had theretofore been a Chevron had changed, overnight—literally overnight—into a Citgo; I told my friend Dede about this that afternoon and her matter-of-fact response, “These things happen,” seemed to underscore the simple and undeniable truth of the matter. These things happen. This is the nature of the world we live in.
But I wonder. I wonder if it’s as immutable as that. And yes it’s because I’m here, the same coffee shop five years later, I wrote dozens of cover letters sitting in here, I applied to grad school. I’ve since left Chicago, began and finished my graduate degree, moved out to and lived in San Francisco for almost two years—and look what’s still here. Last night I went a few rounds with my old favorite bar, two nights before that I met up with an old friend at my second favorite bar, and in between I got a sandwich at one of my old favorite diner/restaurants—all still here. Miraculous, or maybe not, maybe just…normal.
Chicago has always seemed to me to be a qualitatively different town from New York, and since moving to San Francisco it seems in retrospect a different town that that. People seem more settled and—here I know things get dicey, here I drift into the highly unscientific realm of the speculative—less…I don’t know, avariciously ambitious. Here in Chicago, it seems that living a good life is enough. There is not that spiking need to change the world, or at any rate all of it, the part that extends beyond the borders of the city or perhaps the state. It’s an international city to be sure, and I oughn’t overlook the fact that it’s also the third biggest in the United States…but it often seemed to me to be above all a midwestern city. And that’s saying something: a city this big, this cosmopolitan, this much of a minor capital of music and literature and finance and art and still, still irrevocably of its geographical region. New York can’t say this, and neither can San Francisco; sure, New York is fast and clipped and indifferent like much of the east coast, and sure San Francisco is drenched in an unmistakable Californianess—slow, relaxed, progressive down to the very marrow of its bone—but that’s about it, there end its geographical markers. People come to those two cities from everywhere, and they leave for other everywheres almost as quickly.
But like I said, this is highly speculative and thus quite possibly wrong…and yet still I feel it is a point worth making. And I think this is the case because of the distinction I made in the title of this post—making a life vs. making it—a distinction I believe is, perhaps, never more pertinent than in one’s first few years out of college, a time when you begin to decide just what kind of a life you want to live in this world, when you begin making farther reaching decisions, when you start to plot out the first few points of what will become, in earnest, your life. This might be an unfair distinction, but are you going to try to be things, or do things? Again this might be unfair, but are you going to try to know, or be known? Will you look at ‘settling’ as ‘the ability to be content’, or as ‘being unambitious, or lazy’? Will you sit, and look around, and smell area flowers, or will you run run run, keep on hustling because you can sleep when you’re dad [thanks dad!]?
I, for one, am ambitious, but I’ve also been suspicious of that ambition. Why do I want to be a famous, known writer? What will those Pulitzers or National Book Awards or that Nobel get me? And what will it do for everyone else? And, at the end of the very long day of my life, will it really make that much of a difference if I have indeed accomplished these things? If I ever do stand at that podium in Oslo, will all that work and all that living really be suddenly validated? It will it not if I don’t?
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to point out that there’s a new page in town, and it’s called “The Jobless Chronicles,” and if I do say so myself it’s got some pretty witty content. So just go to the sidebar of this main page here, scan down to the T’s, and click. I’ll try to add ‘chapters’, if you will, every few days–the form is a bit more relaxed so I think it will allow for this ‘whipping out’ of material–so check back often.
Alright that’s all for now. Off to UIC in a few moments, through the rain and traffic of 90/94 as it wends its way through downtown Chicago….
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“You see, boys forget what their country means by just reading The Land of the Free in history books. When they get to be men they forget even more. Liberty’s too precious a thing to be buried in books, Miss Saunders. Men should hold it up in front of them every single day of their lives and say: I’m free to think and to speak. My ancestors couldn’t, I can, and my children will. Boys ought to grow up remembering that.” —Mr Smith Goes to Washington
I went to Congress the other day. Walked the halls. I went in to see my representative to get a Gallery Pass and then I went to the Gallery of the House of Representatives, I took a seat, I watched.
Nothing happened.
Congress had just come back into session that day, and nary a soul was on the floor but for one young, besuited man brandishing to a guest whatever moderate stature it was that allowed him to walk unaccompanied on the floor of the House. It was all a bit charming, if not quaint, though I have to say that charm, accompanied or no by quaintness, was not what I was after on my first visit to the location of our United States Congress.
It looks like what I wanted was awe. It appears as though what I was after was oratory that would give me chills, a debate over a bill my grand nieces will read about in their high school US History classes, the kind of great and human operatics of which the marble whispered to me as I walked those halls to get to that seat in the Gallery’s balcony. I was giddy in those first moments after being let in, I was practically giddy even upon entering the building. I think I was stifling laughter, and I know I could barely believe it. The signs to all the Representatives’ offices declared that all were welcome, that all should “come on in.” These were the governing bodies of our land, the people who made the laws and the buildings where those laws were written and passed and upheld, and there I was, just an ordinary citizen from California, originally from Connecticut, walking through the halls. My footsteps went snick snick snick; their echoes peeled out behind and in front of me.
Maybe you do or don’t know by now, but I’m no fool. Nor do I subscribe to, and in any way purvey, your typical jingoist’s fare. I was not taken in by all the grandeur, not seduced by all that marble and teak wood, it takes more than polished bronze to get me, it takes more than the appearance of dignity. They may be our elected officials, but they are not holy. Which is another way of saying—if, that is, we heed what logic dictates, that our government is composed of elected officials, and there is not between or amongst these officials, nor veined in that marble, some nebulous, incalculable dark matter of Americanness, no eternally sanctifying energy come from Jefferson, Franklin—which is another way of saying, this government is, of course, not holy. It is not unimpeachable. It is not perfect.
And yet. And yet still I was giddy, and gushing, still I had what may or may not have been a stupid smile on my face as my feet went snick snick down the halls, as their echoes tumbled shortly after. Still I was agog and I think it had something to do with what Jimmy Stewart’s character said in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, speciifically the part about vigilance. I’ve never been much of a student of history, you see, but I have over the past seven years read newspapers and political magazines, kept up on current events, argued, voted. I have been engaged, as the the phrasing might be, and until I passed through that first metal detector two days ago, until my feet started going snick, I thought that was enough. More than many, certainly, if not most.
But this is what I’m saying—it’s not enough. We grow up, we graduate from college, maybe go to grad school; if we’re not stubborn we begin to read the newspaper regularly, pay a little or a lot of attention, develop beliefs about the world, maybe some voting patterns, if we’re in the 55% who vote, to follow suit. We engage our country, our democracy, if not directly—i.e., writing congresspersons, campaigning, maybe even running ourselves if we see fit—then at least indirectly, at least by voting and telling others how we vote, how they ought to consider voting. And for most of us that’s it. For most of us, the Land of the Free stays in the books, within the well-justified columns of our preferred or local newspapers. For most of us Liberty stays buried in the column inches, between the covers, well-bound, typeset. And that’s even if we care to go looking for it.
But this is not enough. Do you know how many metal detectors I had to go through to get to the Gallery? Do you know how many pens and journals I was able to bring in? Have you any idea how many automatic machine guns I saw while wandering around the mall? Do you know how many of our United States Senators are not millionaires? Three, zero, and one. Which, by my calculus, comes to a looming goose egg for democracy in America as the separation between the rulers and the subjects becomes increasingly impenetrable, as the guns proliferate on pace with the bank accounts of our elected officials, as the phrase ‘ruling class’ slowly, almost imperceptibly (especially if we are not paying attention, if we are not going to the trouble of perceiving), morphs into something more ominous, into something that is more and more difficult to change every two years. They will be there for good, and they will not want to move. They will even begin to do things to quash dissent of all kinds—they will label it “unpatriotic,” they will conflate ‘love of country’ with ‘fearful adulation of the government’—and soon, sooner than we think, we will be less free to think and speak than we remembered, and even though our ancestors had it our children will not. It will atrophy and die from disuse. Liberty, like all other things living, needs oxygen to breathe. And there is no oxygen beneath avalanches of edicts and books.
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