Something about it felt like a game. Like I was playing MASH. Kids: O. Car: 2010 Specialized Vita ladies’ road bike. Occupation: magazine assistant. Salary: $27,000 a year, no benefits. Pets: 0. Husband: a boyfriend who hated me.
In MASH, you win when you have the best life. I did not have the best life. I was 22. I smelled bad all the time. My friends all had rom-com jobs like working at the farmer’s market or being a production assistant. I had a rom-com job, too: I worked at Vogue assisting Sally Singer, the magazine’s creative director. I sat in the equivalent of a secretarial typing pool on the 25th floor of the World Trade Center. Most of what I did involved staring at a Google Calendar or reading a New Yorker article from 1993. One time I had to buy a gold chain in Chinatown. Sometimes when I came to work there would be 9/11 truthers standing outside saying that the Jews did it. I might not have the best life, I thought, but my life did have a sense of intrigue.
When you’re young, a lot of what you do is create a narrative about yourself. For me, this meant that I had escaped my rough suburban upbringing (my parents loved me, and the small upstate suburb where I grew up is beautiful). It meant I told people I went to a lot of punk shows as a teenager (I didn’t, but I did listen to a lot of punk music on the family desktop computer, this being the early 2010s). Now, I was a girl who lived in Brooklyn. I did interesting things on the weekend. No one I worked with could’ve possibly imagined all of the interesting things I did on the weekend (hanging out in a shitty bar, or an even shittier punk venue).
