Don't Worry, It Gets Worse Read online

  They didn’t budge, though. And neither did I. My suitcases remained unpacked. This is only temporary, I kept telling myself, a mantra for a girl who didn’t know when she would take her next steps.

  * * *

  Stalking was how I spent a large portion of my time at home. There wasn’t a moment I didn’t have my computer balanced on my lap, telling my friends how “this town is sooo lame, I just want to go to NYC and get drunk.” I found old classmates online who moved back home and tried to gauge what they were doing without making any contact with them. Some were stagnant. Some of them went to grad school, those lucky procrastinators. Some wrote about commuting, which meant they already had jobs and I wanted to drown them. Some lived in expensive apartments in expensive cities, and I knew, just knew, that their parents were paying for them. Nobody seemed to be doing that great, but most of them lied about it pretty well. Nobody wants to say, “I’m trying to get my feet on the ground” when they’re in their twenties. They want you to think they’re about to do something dangerous, or exciting, or different. We’re not “living at home,” we’re “crashing until we can afford a pad in Brooklyn.”

  And I was the worst offender. I was too good for this. Being among all of my old CDs and clothes and journals was apparently turning me into a teenager again—but this time, the mean girl who I never even was in high school, the kind of girl who wore a lot of eyeliner and painted her middle finger in black sharpie and had sex TOO SOON. All exasperated sighs and eye rolls, like nobody but the people on the Internet could ever understand me. I snapped at my parents over ridiculous things: Mom, this isn’t the right kind of hummus, it’s not even creamy. I constantly bitched to my friends about how there were no good bars, good restaurants, good people, good anything about being home.

  The few times I summoned the courage and motivation to go out, it was to the kind of bars where only Top 40 music was played and greasy Italian-American men fist-pumped through the crowd. I’d sip on my whiskey indifferently, biding my time patiently with my brother and his friends. And inevitably, I wouldn’t even finish my first drink when somebody would scream “ALIDA?!?!?!?!” with the enthusiasm only novelty and alcohol could produce.

  Whoosh. They would descend on me—girls who used to have the same crushes as me and wear similar Tiffany bracelets who were now paralegals, social workers, in nursing school. Real jobs. My old classmates who I hadn’t seen in years, and who I thought I’d never see again. They would hug and paw at me and I would struggle to answer their questions. No, I haven’t seen her in a while. Ha, yeah, I was in Boston. I was going to move to Austin. Yeah, in Texas. But yeah, I’m gonna move to New York soon. No, I’m here for only a little bit longer. I haven’t even unpacked, seriously. Every word out of my mouth was a little bit bitter, each sip of my drink empowering me to act higher and mightier, when deep down, I was just awkward and uncomfortable. I wanted these girls to realize I was going to do something with my life, and not stay here forever. They listened to me, until they saw somebody more interesting—an old football jock from my high school who was supposedly doing very well in the “real estate game,” a girl who was fifteenth runner-up on American Idol. It was clear we had nothing in common anymore, but I would squeal appropriately, promise to keep in touch, and then retreat home in misery. A nerd turned a mean girl turning into a loner.

  * * *

  Three months and forty thousand job applications later, I was still a permanent resident of my parents’ house. Still annoyed, still stubborn, still living out of suitcases like I was moving out any day now. But reality and fate were destined to smack me in the face. It came, as most things do in my life, via television.

  It started off innocently enough. I was with my family watching television, and my parents let me have the remote because they are nice. I tried to put on something that I thought we could “all enjoy” because my dad thinks HBO is stupid, my mom doesn’t like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia because Danny DeVito unnerves her, and I would watch anything but cage fighting. I found something about women who almost perfectly murder their husbands, opened a beer, and we were all very happy.

  When it went to commercial break, however, things got a little uncomfortable. Those stupid back-to-school commercials kept coming on, the ones where the kids are dancing around and gleefully sharpening pencils and happily making sandwiches for their brown-bag lunches. Seeing those commercials about “the most wonderful time of year” used to piss me off when I was in high school, but now? It felt really awkward, kind of like sitting with your parents during a sex scene in a movie. The school supplies were a gloomy reminder: “Hey, lady, now it’s September and you’re doing…what?” Not getting ready for science, not getting ready for teacher’s dirty looks…also not getting ready for any semblance of a career, so it seemed.

  After seeing a few painful rounds of these commercials, my dad turned to me and said, “Alida, since you’re not going to be headin’ back to school anytime soon, maybe you should do something else productive. Like unpack your stuff.” It was a joke that fell flat because the audience didn’t want to hear it.

  It was confirmed. They didn’t think it was a pit stop. There were no job offers rolling in, and I was wearing the same clothes days in a row. It was time to face the music—I was going to have to sit and stay for a while.

  As much as I hated hearing it, this was the push I needed. This wasn’t winter break between semesters. This wasn’t just “hanging out with the parental units.” It felt like a punch to the gut, but a necessary one. I started to protest but stopped. Who was I? My whole “figuring out my future” was being stalled by my inability to act like an adult. An adult recognizes circumstances. An adult unpacks her suitcase. With wounded pride, I headed upstairs, ready to face the task before me. Out came the college notebooks with the little doodles on them, the ornamental shot glasses, the papers on Jane Austen, the leftover pieces of a life I no longer lived.

  An hour or so later, my mom came into my room and sat on my bed, eyeing the piles that I had now strewn across the floor. I could tell she wanted to say something about how I was unpacking, but she was biting her tongue. She instead sat quietly, surveying the questionable wardrobe choices of her adult daughter, which were now fully on display. My mom, bless her, is always concerned that I am ruining my “pretty face and adorable figure” with the things I choose to do to it. I can’t say she’s wrong. Some days, I’ll slap on a skirt, a nice blazer, and wear a cute but fashion-forward button-down, but then the next, I’ll put on baggy denim shorts and my favorite cutoff top, a bright orange thing that says “Jump for JESUS,” with little sneakers on it. I caught the pained look on her face when I pulled out a weird fuzzy vest I had thought would make me look like an LA girl in a band. (I didn’t. I looked like a third grader who dressed herself like a Build-A-Bear.) A ripped tie-dyed crop top looked like it was going to put her over the edge.

  Glancing at my mom’s face, I started to get an idea of what she was thinking during these last few months: Okay, my daughter is cutting off all her hair and wearing dumb shit and staying up till 4 A.M. on the Internet. She seems to like wine a lot. Should I be concerned? She’s still the same sarcastic little wiseass I know, but is she going insane? Is she applying for enough jobs? The right ones? Should I say something?

  My mom and I have always been close. She’s always asked me about my problems, and because she did, I told her about them. She always knew who I was dating, who I had a crush on, what friend was pissing me off, and how I was afraid of dying alone or gaining one thousand pounds so I’d have to be wheeled out of the house by paramedics for a one-hour TV special. She was fine with everything I did and respected the choices I made. But it must have been a little odd for her, seeing how her daughter actually lived. Not just what I told her on the phone, but she got to see it, every day, and in her face. My parents had loved me and raised me, sent me on my way for a few years, and now I had come back a slightly different person. They hadn’t known of my habit of spea
king out of the side of my mouth. They didn’t realize that I had become twice as socially anxious or that I liked artichokes now. Little things, but things that started to compose Alida: The Adult Years.

  And at the same time, I wanted to prove that I was somebody who could rank with them, or at least somebody who could be something. That’s why I was fighting unpacking. I didn’t want to disappoint them, deep down, and I didn’t want to disappoint myself.

  Somewhere around there, I think my mother realized that she was done raising me. I wasn’t a kid anymore, even if my version of “adult” wasn’t exactly working seamlessly. Now she only had to give me advice, hug me, remind me that I needed to take vitamins, and tell me that I looked pretty with my hair longer. I could choose to take that advice, or I couldn’t, but it wasn’t up to my parents to get me anywhere anymore. We both let the high school Alida who lived in this house go.

  “Thanks, Mom,” I said to her, for no real reason she could latch on to.

  “Do you want me to make dinner for you? You, uh…bought groceries, right?” My privilege was showing, a badge of something that looked a little bit like lucky.

  I unpacked slowly that night, putting all the things I had collected in college in the old, familiar drawers. My new life finally connected with my old life.

  * * *

  Months later, with the help from freelance jobs, part-time gigs, and prayers to Satan, I would scrounge enough money to move out. All things change, and if you want them enough, they change faster than you expect. Money was saved, plans were made, and before I knew it, I stood in my childhood bedroom with the Britney Spears CDs and closed the door to move somewhere else. Suburban life with my parents hadn’t stilted my growth; in reality, it had taught me that some things, if you were lucky enough, would always be there if you needed them.

  “Should I start taking these posters down?” my mother asked me, always looking for a new home project to take on.

  “No, Mom, leave them. Just in case.”

  Get a Job, You Bum

  After I graduated college and was on month six of joblessness, I kept encountering people who asked me how I was “dealing with being unemployed,” with the same tone people use to ask “Are you okay?” after someone dies. Scrunched face, head tilted to the side, cautious concern in their voice. Relatives, neighbors, former classmates who wanted to secretly gloat about their sweet job at NBC—it didn’t matter who, but inevitably, the first question out of their mouths involved why I didn’t have a job yet. The reason was because I got a degree in pipe dreams and graduated into a festering hell pit of a terrible economy, but you know. I was dealing with it just fine, thanks for asking, just keeping on keeping on, applying for anything and everything, and ha-ha, yeah, it was nice to have some spare time! Truth was, though, the freedom of “doing whatever I want, whenever I want, and doing it while pantsless” was becoming miserable for me. I had kept a steady job since I was sixteen years old. While the first weeks of nothing to do were filled with “I can get up whenever” glee, that loses its luster pretty damn fast.

  What does one do when every day is an open-ended schedule? Let’s see. I ate a lot. I organized my clothes by color one day. I tried to cut my own hair. Mostly, I did a lot of lazing around. I tried to get up early in the morning, because every time I got up after 12 P.M., I felt like I was acting like the irresponsible stepfather of my own life. Because I had little else to do those mornings other than the suffocating and immense task of finding a job, I often spent my time watching hours of morning TV. Here’s my theory about early-morning shows: They’re annoying and terrible on purpose to encourage people to get off the couch and get a job. I had always known there were a significant number of people in this country who did not know the identity of their fathers, but until my stint of unemployment, I didn’t realize the verifiable insanity of those who choose to go on television to discuss this topic. These shows are filled with screaming women with heaving breasts who managed to sleep with the skinniest, slimiest men without teeth they could find. Then they’d cut to this adorable baby who was probably thinking “Well, either way I think I’m pretty much screwed with whoever my parents are, so I better start saving for college now.” All of the commercials were basic variations of CALL THIS NUMBER AND GO BACK TO SCHOOL. FOR CHRIST’S SAKE, WHY ARE YOU WATCHING THIS?! Watching trashy morning shows day after day was pretty much the only inspiration I had to become employed again.

  But no matter how much Maury inspired me to get my ass off the couch and Monster.com it up for hours on end, I had to face reality. I had graduated with a liberal arts degree from a small, artsy school, and therefore my marketable skills were limited to talking about queer theory and knowing how to wear clothes from Goodwill to look like an Olsen twin. My résumé pretty much looked this:

  Alida A. Nugent

  Here’s my e-mail address and my phone number.

  It’s funny that I put these here because you’re not going to call me, are you?

  EDUCATION

  Emerson College, Bachelor of Arts in “Writing”May 2010

  I put that “writing” part in quotes because I know what you’re already thinking—that it wasn’t the best choice for a career path and that I’m probably not very good with math. I’m terrible at math, so you’re right about that. Dude, it’s not like I’m going to ask you to read my stories, okay? I’m just going to work your shitty little job filing papers and doing blurbs about movies or maybe correcting a memo that has some typos every once in a while. You should just be happy that I have a basic understanding of word processing programs, which I am now representing poorly in this not-very-well-formatted résumé.

  Was on the Dean’s List once.

  And academic probation twice, maybe three times.

  EXPERIENCE

  This One Comedy Troupe

  Because that’s a real fucking “skill,” huh? Writing three-minute sketches about businessmen in space and performing them to a bunch of bored, drunk underclassmen? But I was treasurer! I always handed the forms in late; oh god, please don’t judge me.

  This One Writing Piece I Did

  For a literary magazine that I will lie about and say I edited content in for three years, which I didn’t, but I assume I would have done a decent job if I had.

  Coffee Shop Job

  My experience should prove to you that I am only qualified to work in another coffee shop, but I’m going to go for the gold anyway. Did you know that I was late for work a lot? If you hire me, that’s your cross to bear. However, I did fairly well on my biyearly reviews with praise like, “Doesn’t yell at people as much or look nearly as miserable as she did a year ago.”

  PROFICIENT IN

  At least one of the eight computer programs I have just listed. Oh, and I’m really good with people. But only if I’m drinking with them.

  With this stacked résumé, it’s a shock that I didn’t get hired right away as an editor for a prestigious magazine, or as a features writer for a totally cool music Web site, or at least, as a homeless prop comic.

  It wasn’t completely my fault that I wasn’t having any luck. The economy had bottomed out and the job market, at this point, seemed to be 80 percent “knowing people.” And I didn’t know anybody at all. I never tried to get to know people, because I didn’t want the terrible reputation of being a networker when I was still in college. You know who I’m talking about: the douchebag who bought business cards online that said “entrepreneur” on them when they were still in school. I might not have had a lot of motivation in college but my sole one may have been to not be that guy at the party. I couldn’t be that person even if I wanted to, though, because my networking skills are comparable to that of a rabid pit bull let loose in a nursery school. I hate being persistent, I don’t like wearing sweaters to “functions,” and I never want to attempt putting my entire body up somebody else’s ass. My brother told me that with my people skills and tendency toward being grubby, I might do well as a garbageman, a job that had bet
ter benefits and more pay than any position I’d hold in the next ten years. I was disappointed to find out that even for that job you need a goddamn connection. Hopeless. Even the simplest positions, the mindless ones where all you had to do was file and put stuff in alphabetical order and say hello into a phone, were as competitive as going after an Olympic gold medal. To have your résumé considered, an applicant needed approximately sixteen years of secretarial school and also must be able to manage wrangling in a pack of wolves while bedazzling a jacket. You must also be a wizard, Harry.

  Since full-time jobs that were attractive and relevant to my education didn’t seem to exist, I started to apply for every other job under the sun, including the part-time ones and the dreaded internships. Part-time jobs were limited: coffee shops, sex workers, bartenders. I couldn’t be a bartender because becoming a bartender in New York City required bigger breasts than I had, unending patience, and the blood of a first born. But I figured I could probably land an internship. You know, because I needed more “experience” to do something that I was trained to do in college.

  Application after application went out, and day after day I’d hear nothing. I was getting fed up. So eventually I did what I do when I get fed up: drink. Not that this really makes my case any better, but in order to ease my frustrations, I started to apply to internships while drinking (sorry, Mom). I would curl up on my couch at eleven at night, clutching my glass of wine like I was about to send a text to a guy I had a crush on, and you know how that goes. Panic eases with one glass of wine, one turns into five, and soon enough, applying for internships and shit jobs seemed almost entertaining.