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Sunday, January 16, 2011
Pilot Episode: "The Origins of the Accidental MPP"
Welcome to "The Accidental MPP" -a blog to highlight the contradictions, uncertainties and, hopefully, the rich potentialities of what it means to be a Millennial navigating the landscape of a post-graduate career. It is designed to help me make sense of the hours, then weeks, then months of my graduate coursework and to help me understand and share with others, why it is we imbue ourselves with debt, sleepless nights, and heartache in the illusive pursuit of social capital.
'The accident' -all $70,000 of it, began as a mere sparkle in my eye at the unlikeliest of places 2 year ago.
Moment 1: Dropping the Ball
Starring vacantly into my computer monitor as the lone late night receptionist shift on New Years Eve 2008, I found myself reaching a heightened saturation point of the monotony that had become endemic among my fellow working contemporaries. Maybe it was because the euphoria trumpeted by Barack Obama's election eight weeks earlier had started to tapper, or maybe it was because the Lehman Brothers office upstairs on the 13th floor had been tossing weary-eyed accountants onto the street like lube/condoms on Anzac Parade during the Mardis Gras, but it was on that evening in the vacuous belly of the Governor Macquarie Financial Lobby that I had my Epiphany: it was time to go to grad school.
Actually, this was never supposed to happen. I had been working 2 years previously, in an quintessentially normative job, replete with cubicles and consultant jargon, daily offering of inane banter before the idol of the water cooler , and all the other trappings of corporate banality that two decades of satirical IFC films had prepared me for. The way I saw it, I had paid my dues, got some mileage out of my BA in English, and had successfully escaped from the rate-race of conventionality. Armed with a one-way plane ticket and a half-ass working/holiday visa I printed online with minimal scrutiny, I had flown to Australia with US $800 in my wallet hoping to lose myself and hoping for one last attempt at adventure before being claimed by adulthood.
Moment Two: Carlie with a Chance of Meatballs (The Moment that Never Happened!)
I never would have applied if Carlie had been there to intervene. Normally, when such a distressingly absurd thought as 'I need to go to Grad School' would enter my mind, I would confer with my make-shift-life-coach Carlie, and I would be confident that the 27 year old co-receptionist who winked, dressed, and bobbed her head like Kylie Mingoue circa 1986 would promptly discredit any idea I expressed that was halfway ambitious or slightly intelligible. When she wasn't deflecting sexual harassment from every male staff except the Polynesian Security guard, Carlie would flutter her eyes lashes and enable my enduring laziness by encouraging me to take an extra long lunch break, lean in the my ear when customers were waiting and tease that I should sleep in late and let the eight-month pregnant Doris, who was practically a pinata bursting with amniotic fluid cover the shift. Carlie she would punctuate each of her suggestions with a helium-induced giggle.
Carlie was more poised, however, when it came to discourse on relationships as she was going through a separation. Since I had arrived in Sydney three months earlier, Carlie had moved out to her own apartment to experience, for the first time in life marked by successive co-dependence, what it meant to be solitary. This bold move was not helped by her daily proximity to the Polynesian Security Guard, the only heterosexual staff member who did not act as if hitting on her was his sole performance measure. It took me a week to realized he was ultimately Carlie's husband -who she still loved but could not cohabit with for reasons she could not articulate. In moving out of her house, Carlie had invited financial difficulties and I believed it was out of a sense of guilt and matrimonial obligation that she helped him get a job in security. Through work she had escape the drudgery of her role as wife -and now, with tender awkwardness, she and her husband silently negotiated their relationship for eight hours a day and returned to separate homes. When Carlie would speak about the bittersweet compromises of marriage and budgets and jobs, of how her desire to go on a travel South East Asia rubs up like tectonic plates against her ache to have children, she would become wistful, wise, and sad at the same time. At every other moment, she would put on the theatrics of a Harlequin. She was neither theatrical nor somber when I had my Epiphany that New Year's Eve. She was not there to talk me out of applying to the MPP program.
Moment 3: Trick-or-Treat
The Governor MacQuarie job, as coosh and mindless and safe as it was fizzled out and I found myself going through a revolving door of jobs -waiting and bar tending mostly before stumbling upon a gig as a door-to-door salesman. It was a sweltering February in Sydney with afternoon highs at 115 Fahrenheit and I was down to my last hundred bucks to make ends meet. I had to wear a uniform two sizes too large as I went door to door to sell not kitchen knives, not girlscout cookies but the intangible benefits of cheaper energy rates. (YAWN) The job was simply awful and I would return, having made no sales, having impressed no one, sunburned, sweaty and frustrated. Gradually, customers took pity on me and started offering me water. Then, I started asking for water. Then they would offer me food. Then they would invite me to stick around and share life stories. Then they offered me beer. The logical conclusion of my efforts is that I would go door to door asking people for beer. Suddenly, it no longer mattered that I didn't make any sales: my salesjob became trick or treating! The next morning after a long, arduous day of getting wasted in the backyards of South Sydney, I rolled over on the floor of my inner-west-suburb flat. I rubbed my eyes and brushed my fingers through my hair coughing up a lung and half in the process. It was then that I starred at horror at my precariously opened laptop and realized what had happened. In my mindless drunken stoopper, I had, at 4:13am accidentally applied to Grad School! To rip off TS Elliot, who had ripped off Conrad, 'The Horror, the Horror!"
As a current MPP Candidate, I am still living with the consequences of my reckless, drunken action to this day!
'The accident' -all $70,000 of it, began as a mere sparkle in my eye at the unlikeliest of places 2 year ago.
Moment 1: Dropping the Ball
Starring vacantly into my computer monitor as the lone late night receptionist shift on New Years Eve 2008, I found myself reaching a heightened saturation point of the monotony that had become endemic among my fellow working contemporaries. Maybe it was because the euphoria trumpeted by Barack Obama's election eight weeks earlier had started to tapper, or maybe it was because the Lehman Brothers office upstairs on the 13th floor had been tossing weary-eyed accountants onto the street like lube/condoms on Anzac Parade during the Mardis Gras, but it was on that evening in the vacuous belly of the Governor Macquarie Financial Lobby that I had my Epiphany: it was time to go to grad school.
Actually, this was never supposed to happen. I had been working 2 years previously, in an quintessentially normative job, replete with cubicles and consultant jargon, daily offering of inane banter before the idol of the water cooler , and all the other trappings of corporate banality that two decades of satirical IFC films had prepared me for. The way I saw it, I had paid my dues, got some mileage out of my BA in English, and had successfully escaped from the rate-race of conventionality. Armed with a one-way plane ticket and a half-ass working/holiday visa I printed online with minimal scrutiny, I had flown to Australia with US $800 in my wallet hoping to lose myself and hoping for one last attempt at adventure before being claimed by adulthood.
Moment Two: Carlie with a Chance of Meatballs (The Moment that Never Happened!)
I never would have applied if Carlie had been there to intervene. Normally, when such a distressingly absurd thought as 'I need to go to Grad School' would enter my mind, I would confer with my make-shift-life-coach Carlie, and I would be confident that the 27 year old co-receptionist who winked, dressed, and bobbed her head like Kylie Mingoue circa 1986 would promptly discredit any idea I expressed that was halfway ambitious or slightly intelligible. When she wasn't deflecting sexual harassment from every male staff except the Polynesian Security guard, Carlie would flutter her eyes lashes and enable my enduring laziness by encouraging me to take an extra long lunch break, lean in the my ear when customers were waiting and tease that I should sleep in late and let the eight-month pregnant Doris, who was practically a pinata bursting with amniotic fluid cover the shift. Carlie she would punctuate each of her suggestions with a helium-induced giggle.
Carlie was more poised, however, when it came to discourse on relationships as she was going through a separation. Since I had arrived in Sydney three months earlier, Carlie had moved out to her own apartment to experience, for the first time in life marked by successive co-dependence, what it meant to be solitary. This bold move was not helped by her daily proximity to the Polynesian Security Guard, the only heterosexual staff member who did not act as if hitting on her was his sole performance measure. It took me a week to realized he was ultimately Carlie's husband -who she still loved but could not cohabit with for reasons she could not articulate. In moving out of her house, Carlie had invited financial difficulties and I believed it was out of a sense of guilt and matrimonial obligation that she helped him get a job in security. Through work she had escape the drudgery of her role as wife -and now, with tender awkwardness, she and her husband silently negotiated their relationship for eight hours a day and returned to separate homes. When Carlie would speak about the bittersweet compromises of marriage and budgets and jobs, of how her desire to go on a travel South East Asia rubs up like tectonic plates against her ache to have children, she would become wistful, wise, and sad at the same time. At every other moment, she would put on the theatrics of a Harlequin. She was neither theatrical nor somber when I had my Epiphany that New Year's Eve. She was not there to talk me out of applying to the MPP program.
Moment 3: Trick-or-Treat
The Governor MacQuarie job, as coosh and mindless and safe as it was fizzled out and I found myself going through a revolving door of jobs -waiting and bar tending mostly before stumbling upon a gig as a door-to-door salesman. It was a sweltering February in Sydney with afternoon highs at 115 Fahrenheit and I was down to my last hundred bucks to make ends meet. I had to wear a uniform two sizes too large as I went door to door to sell not kitchen knives, not girlscout cookies but the intangible benefits of cheaper energy rates. (YAWN) The job was simply awful and I would return, having made no sales, having impressed no one, sunburned, sweaty and frustrated. Gradually, customers took pity on me and started offering me water. Then, I started asking for water. Then they would offer me food. Then they would invite me to stick around and share life stories. Then they offered me beer. The logical conclusion of my efforts is that I would go door to door asking people for beer. Suddenly, it no longer mattered that I didn't make any sales: my salesjob became trick or treating! The next morning after a long, arduous day of getting wasted in the backyards of South Sydney, I rolled over on the floor of my inner-west-suburb flat. I rubbed my eyes and brushed my fingers through my hair coughing up a lung and half in the process. It was then that I starred at horror at my precariously opened laptop and realized what had happened. In my mindless drunken stoopper, I had, at 4:13am accidentally applied to Grad School! To rip off TS Elliot, who had ripped off Conrad, 'The Horror, the Horror!"
As a current MPP Candidate, I am still living with the consequences of my reckless, drunken action to this day!
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