Don't Worry, It Gets Worse Read online

  I was never good at cover letters when I was sober, because I felt like I was selling myself for something I didn’t even want in the first place, so writing them with a belly full of wine? They weren’t my most shining of moments:

  Example One

  To Whom It May Concern:

  Twenty minutes ago, I changed from my track shorts to my “goin’ out shorts,” which are, in fact, just long denim shorts that I find acceptably cool because they are ripped. Why am I telling you this? Because this is my life now, posteducation. This is the bed I am laying in or lying in. I’m not even sure how to use that correctly anymore, although in case you are wondering, I am quite dignified enough to write this note sitting up.

  But, in all honesty, you should hire me in my postgraduate state because I am an ambitious person who promises to work extremely hard for very little money. I make very good coffee, and I have been told my fax sending is unparalleled. I also understand the concepts of “coming to work on time” and “being relatively quiet.” I have worked hard for four years at an urban writing program, so one day I can begin work at an entry-level job so I can one day be paid for being funny. I believe that a company such as yours would be an honor and a privilege to work for—I would love to do whatever I can to start my career with you.

  Sincerely yours,

  Alida Nugent

  This went to a comedy Web site directed toward girls, and not only did I tell them I didn’t know the correct usage of the word lay, I also think that the phrase whatever I can has the connotation that I would sleep with anybody who would hire me at this point. (There is no way I would get hired for my sexual skills. I drool too much during oral.)

  Example Two

  Hello. My name is Alida Nugent. I’m a 22-year-old recent college grad who enjoys watching Intervention and is disturbed by Eminem’s comeback. I want to make money writing funny things or at least encounter a magical world where loans are in the past and I don’t have to work a service job anymore. I read [the Web site] because it makes me laugh and I like knowing that some people’s first time with sex was worse than mine. I have this fantasy where you let me write for you for three months for no pay and I make you good coffee (I used to work as a barista—six years) and you hire me because I am so funny and then Jesus comes back and fixes everything. OH.

  Okay, so I guess this blurb is supposed to sound professional. Well, I can be professional, too. I wear button-down shirts and I know what “come to work on time” means. I have a great phone voice. I make copies with the best of them.

  Sincerely,

  Alida Nugent

  This one was for a pop-culture Web site, and a relatively popular one at that. I imagine that, at the time, I thought the Jesus reference was adorable. It is probably becoming alarmingly clear to you that I have little to no sense of professionalism.

  The urgency to find a job came along with my first loan bill. With a snap of the fingers, the days of drunk applications and hangin’ on the couch watching Maury were over. I opened up the stark white envelope with trepidation, and there the letter was, asking me kindly to pay up:

  Hello, Alida!

  If you can believe it, your six months since graduation are now up. I’m going to ask you to stop screaming now. Hope this finds you happy, and by happy I mean you have lots of money in your pocket, because now you have to start paying us back about twice as much as you borrowed. It’s not a big deal, just around three hundred dollars every month till you turn thirty-eight years old. If you don’t do that, we’ll ruin your credit and you’ll never be able to buy a car or an apartment or happiness, because you can now buy happiness. That was a little joke, but it wasn’t, because if you don’t pay us back we will find you. When you are sleeping. And we will steal your childhood blankie or saw off one of your arms. We’ll then steal your first-born child from the floating-child heaven sky, or hire a spirit stealer to ruin your life. For example: Every uplifting movie that you watch about animals from now on will end in tragedy. It will be very sad, or “ruff” (another joke).

  Love, Loans

  My first check was sent with bitterness, marking a cold, hard day in my life. ADULTHOOD was officially here, and I needed to get off my ass and embrace it. It was more motivating than the makeover montage in Clueless, or for you old-timers, a Rocky montage. I had to step up my game and put this diploma to good use, or else the mustachioed loan guys would come after me.

  When you go to college and expect your career to take off like the Rocketeer, and the only options that you have in front of you are not even mildly related to what you studied, you will become a little desperate to work anywhere. Despite being from a liberal arts background, I didn’t really have a strong opinion about “being a corporate drone,” which is something a character would say on a show where they generalize art kids. I had no problem being a corporate drone if it paid my bills and thereby tried to get a job doing secretarial work in an office. I had done it before, on break from college during the summer, and let me tell you, it was not as charming and cute as Pam Halpert makes it seem.

  Number one rule of working a secretarial job: You should probably be okay with answering a phone. Even now, the sound of a landline phone makes me pee my pants a bit, because I think it’s somebody older than me calling to yell at me. When most people call an office, they are under the impression that whoever answered the phones knows absolutely everything about the company they are calling. And I never knew the answers. “Do you know when my case will be reviewed?” a guy would frantically yell on the other end of the receiver. Um, sorry, no, I don’t, I would answer. When people caught on to that, their rage grew tie-wearing wings. Why NOT? Uh, because I am wearing a blazer I got from the junior’s section of your local department store, that’s why. I am young enough to be your grandchild, and I spent the twenty minutes before you called me reading about how Sarah Michelle Gellar’s baby daughter eats sushi.

  Number two rule of being a decent secretary: Master the art of filing. One would assume this seems like an easy task as long as you know the alphabet. Well, imagine the library the Beast presents to Belle. That’s a real nice library, right? Now imagine having to put everything in that humongous library in order, except thirty people have the same name, forty million of the files you need to put away have gone missing, and it’s eight in the morning. The Disney magic fades mighty fast, you best believe it.

  After a few weeks of working at an office, I realized I was becoming the kind of person who was finding joy in the little things—and by little things, I mean meaningless, stupid distractions from my shitty job. A reprieve of going to the copy machine and getting the pleasure of mindlessly staring at the wall for five minutes was magical. Trips to the bathroom were a joyous urination break where I washed my hands till they became pruney. And don’t forget about the absolute thrill of lunch. I couldn’t wait to run to the freezer and get out my little prepackaged frozen dinner, a low-calorie macaroni and cheese that I would eat with the same delight a child experiences on Christmas morning. On the occasions that I went out beyond the office doors to buy a salad, you’d think I was being let out of prison after a twenty-year sentence. I was becoming weak, mostly due to the large consumption of Lean Cuisine, and the only way I could fight da power was to dye a huge bloodred streak in my hair that made me look like an anime character. This, I suspect, was why they eventually told me they “didn’t need me anymore.” Nobody wants to be greeted by a sad little girl with terrible hair who spends most of her time making PowerPoint projects of dinosaurs eating chimpanzees. I realized I could and would not be able to hold another secretarial job again. We were as incompatible as people who are normal and people who think it’s normal to speed date.

  Thus I entered the world of freelance work, something I heartily recommend to any depressed liberal arts graduate. When I decided to enter the world of freelance writing, I let out a large sigh, which is good, because freelance jobs are the exhausted sigh of the job world. It’s giving up without really
giving up. There are freelancers who get paid a lot and are their own boss and love it. That takes years and motivation and patience, and is very admirable. Mostly, though, young freelancers are people who realize they are unemployable and therefore need to do something to pay their bills, even if it means you get treated like shit. It’s the easiest job to land because you don’t get any health care benefits, or a steady pay, or any emotional security. It’s sort of like working for Aunt March in Little Women or your fourth-grade teacher who hated you. You are hired under the premise that they are not expected to care about you at all, but they have decided to take on the burden of looking after you anyway.

  My first job was to write lots of lists about pop culture, spending hours scouring the Internet for more than six vampires I would have sex with. The bosses would send thousands of passive-aggressive e-mails with “Do you THINK YOU CAN HANDLE this workload?” even though it was a 750-word assignment. I would reply equally as passive-aggressively with a “maybe .” I never met any of these people I wrote for, and I used to imagine them all as Emily Blunt in The Devil Wears Prada, but perhaps with a chic pair of pants from the Loft.

  After a while, I acquired three freelance jobs for three different Web sites, and I found myself miserably terrible at all of them. Every article I posted was greeted with nightmarish responses from various men taking breaks from masturbating on Chatroulette to troll the Internet. “This girl can’t write for shit,” they would start, and this would lead to the eventual sort of conclusion about how I should be killed for my writing. You’d be surprised how many people took the time to discuss how I needed to be murdered for my scathing opinion on sexy television cops. It was very encouraging.

  From a business angle, I was even worse off. In freelance, they don’t pay you unless you send in an invoice. I am incredibly bad at paperwork, because it takes only four minutes to complete but feels like such a large task. A simple spreadsheet was too much for this naïve college grad! I would often forget to send in invoices or keep track of the jobs I did, and would therefore not get paid. You also don’t get taxed while working freelance—they let you tax yourself, mostly because they don’t believe you’re a real citizen of America yet. Idiotic me spent all my money and didn’t actually think about taxes until April, until I owed almost three thousand dollars to the government because I wasted a year of my life making silly jokes about Rihanna. For a job that doesn’t believe you can handle a full-time responsibility, they certainly give you a lot of responsibilities. I was bad at all of them.

  The worst part about the job, I think, was that it made me realize how much I wanted to be paid to be a writer. I would wake up at noon, burping old whiskey, sit down in front of my on-its-last-legs laptop, and write for a couple of hours about things I hated. I loved it, though, not because of what I was doing at the moment but because of what I might be able to eventually do with this experience. I loved the feeling of getting a paycheck by people who didn’t care about me, to write for people who wanted my head chopped off. It felt dirty and gross and thrilling.

  “Ah,” I said. “I’m getting paid peanuts and am relatively pleased with myself. I’d like to find more ways to do this, for more money, and probably for the rest of my life.”

  Sitting in my pajamas, seeing if my seventy-five dollars had gone through to my checking account, I realized what I wanted. It wasn’t a where, it was a where to next, small steps toward my eventual goal of becoming a full-time writer. This was my start.

  This is the one perk to being young and underemployed—you find a trajectory for your daydreams, of getting more or wanting more or wanting something different. And when you’re working toward your dreams, you have to start at the bottom. The idea that we should all start at the low end of the totem pole is the kind of sentiment that has been passed on to our generation from all the ones before it, but it’s still good advice. Toughing it out is essential no matter what year we were born, and it probably won’t get any easier anytime soon. You’ve got to be willing to do a lot of thankless things before you see any reward. Taking shit is how you get up to the top; working hard is how you stay for years at the bottom until you move up slowly to middle ground.

  It’s daunting to go after the things you want, even when you’re not entirely sure they will always be the things you want. I’ll tell you, however, what you do want—a fire under your ass. A push. A constant toward something better. This is something I’m willing to suffer for, 750 words at a time.

  Save a Five, Lose a Hundred

  I’m not good at saving money, probably because I don’t have a lot of it. If I took all the money I had out of my bank account and recklessly spent it, I could relax for one day in a soup kitchen by a Sandals resort, staring wistfully at the family-filled water. I could pay a lady to let me hold Gucci. I could fly economy class to Vegas and double my money, then lose it, then sadly kiss a bathroom attendant until he brings me an alcoholic slushie the size of my head. The older I get, though, the more I feel pressure to actually use my savings account for savings, rather than spending the little money I have on iced coffee and $4.99 Julia Roberts DVDs.

  So one day, with a bottle of two-dollar wine and my “accounting hat” on (which is an optimistic but clinically depressed fedora), I wrote out a budget. I am sharing it here because I assume we have a lot in common, like money woes and destructive behavior. The next few pages contain a list of my monthly required expenses, followed by ways I have saved money. You can copy it and adjust the numbers as you see fit.

  Monthly Expenses

  Place of residence: Home is where the largest chunk of your cash goes! For some, it’s an apartment or house. For others, it’s free because you live with your parents, which is a smart saving technique if you’re okay having to pay via long-winded conversations with your parents about how Twitter works, how you are aware that it is stupid, and how the phrase going steady does not exist anymore. For me, it’s a decrepit shoe box apartment that houses an assortment of rodents and critters. Cost: eight hundred dollars a month to a man I have seen only once.

  Electric and gas and phone and cable bills, oh my!: Cable is required for me, and so is the Internet, because I am obviously chained to both. Why watch TV if you can’t look at .gifs from the NBC Thursday lineup even though you already watched it and remember what happened? So those bills are handled swiftly, like my life depends on it. Electric bills, though, don’t need to be handled so vigilantly—maybe once every four months, until a notice comes in the mail that the company is going to turn it off. This gives me the incentive to pay it, but it comes with two hours of waiting on hold, listening to an upbeat voice recording of how to reduce your energy bill by not being such a baby about the heat, which maybe isn’t worth the delay. Cost: 350 dollars, if I choose to bite the bullet, dig through my e-mails to find the account number, and pay it.

  Toiletries: Inevitably, my roommates will eventually hint to the fact that I have not been the one to buy toilet paper in months but let me off the hook because they know I don’t mean to be such a bad roommate. So in order to hold on to the few friends I still have, I go to the local Duane Reade drugstore and stock up on toilet paper, which is reasonably priced when purchased in bulk, for around eleven dollars. Then I decide I need to try dark lipstick because my makeup routine is getting predictable. Passing through to the cosmetics aisle, I decide my hair could use more volume and say to myself, “This twelve-dollar hairspray should do the trick.” And ooh…sweet ’n salty Chex Mix. And bodywash that smells like coconuts! And cleaning products that look fun and might encourage me to actually clean! Cost: forty-five dollars, if I’m lucky.

  Laundry: Sure, I could do laundry myself for mere quarters, but I do not know where my drier sheets are, and my towel smells like mold and I do not know the steps to get rid of it, so I just avoid the task as long as possible. Cost: twelve dollars to the laundry service when I finally decide to do it. It may not be a lot in the long run, but it’s an exorbitant amount to spend on eight-dollar
shirts I could’ve washed myself.

  Food: Groceries are never required. Required trips to the beloved snack warehouse Trader Joe’s are. Sure, I forget to buy sensible things, like eggs, and avoid purchasing marinara sauce because it’s too heavy to carry, but I’ll stock up on frozen pasta dishes that cost more than it would to make it myself, buckets of hummus, blocks of brie for four dollars, and five different things that are “artisanal” because they’re coated in chocolate or Tuscan herbs. And, inevitably, the wait on the never-ending line tires me out, so I end up calling all my friends to see which one of them will eat Thai food out with me, spending double the amount I saved. Brunch is a weekend necessity. Late-night pizza is essential, too, because nothing will humble you more than eating a lukewarm slice at 2 A.M., letting the sauce dribble down your shameful body. Cost: probably hundreds, I’m too afraid to add it up. God help us all if there are birthday dinners this month held at cozy cafés that cost three dollars a bite.

  Credit card bill and college loans or “what is the possible minimum I can pay and how does it seem like every time I pay a dollar, another mountain owed appears?” Cost: around 600 dollars, the ability to have a decent credit report, and little pieces of my soul.

  Clothing: One has to look nice. One has to cheer oneself up by going to a popular tween clothing superstore and purchasing clothing that are “real risk-taking pieces,” like that one studded dress I’ve seen on high school girls on their fashion blogs. One will always need newer shoes. One will always feel better wearing a different outfit to the same bar with the same people. Cost: If it’s a season change, I drop at least 150 dollars. There’s twelve seasons in a year, right?