Living Quietly

It's been a month exactly since my last post, and so very much has happened. I'm happily back in Oberlin, Ohio, finishing my last semester of college-- which is both surreal and joyful.

Today, I was offered a job I wanted very much in Copenhagen, Denmark-- an internship position at the very same school I attended back in Fall 2009. I'm feeling grateful and dizzy, in that order, and a small measure of sadness. My life in America has been so good lately. I hope leaving for thirteen months to settle temporarily abroad isn't turning my back on everything (everyone) I love here.

I hope to get this blog up and running again as the departure date grows nearer. And I hope the Americans I love can visit me.

A Fourth Week Reflection

Blogs! Travel blogs, work blogs, internship blogs, project blogs, volunteer blogs, graduate school blogs. Just about every college student and postgrad has a reason to blog and a half-baked dream of penning the next inspiration for a Hollywood hit a la "Julie & Julia"-- but almost none of our lives have a fraction of the required glamor. And fewer still have a fraction of the required appeal.

I wish I'd written more about interning at National Geographic, but the sad truth is that four weeks is a really short amount of time. This is my 23rd day in Washington, DC, and I'm not sure what I have to show for it other than a painfully depleted bank account.

THINGS I'VE LEARNED THE HARD WAY ABOUT OUR NATION'S CAPITAL

- Everyone is political. Everyone. And sometimes it's appropriate to discuss. And sometimes, apparently, it's very much not. Pulling out your copy of The Militant on a train near the White House might not be the smartest move you make that day.

- Eating out is more expensive here than in most major US cities, because District restaurants and bars cater to high-powered lawyers and politicians. Why bother with a student menu or cheap ethnic food when you can make bank decking out a hole-in-the-wall with suit-luring decor?

- Food trucks just look and taste cheap. A cupcake is still $3, and a tiny slice of pizza that would embarrass New York and Chicago goes for a cool $5.

- The Metro claims to be one of the cleanest public transit systems in the country, and actively pursues this agenda with terrifying, 300x -sized pictures of rats on posters throughout city terminals with the distressing caption: "You gonna eat that?"

- The Metro, like the food, is over-priced. There is actually a calculator on the DC transit's website designed to calculate whether your trip in and out of the District is more cost-effective with a car or with the train. ?! Public transportation should ALWAYS be cheaper than driving. That's why it's called "public transportation" - it's meant to be for the public. You don't even see homeless people getting warmth and rest on train cars or buses because the cost is prohibitive. That's not right. If the country can't even support cheap public transit in its capital city, there's something wrong.

Highs and Lows of Unpaid Jobs: An Interning Manifesta

Working at National Geographic Traveler this month technically marks my fourth time being an intern. (If I were honest, though, I'd have to say that the time I briefly interned for wonderful theater company Strange Tree -- last January Term, kind of-- shouldn't really count. Because I don't have a driver's license, I ended up not being particularly helpful to them, much as we all wished I could have been. They are incredible people who do incredible work, but that was the only time I felt, as an intern, that I wasn't really altogether as helpful as I should have been.)

The two other times I've been an intern have also been with theater companies, Steppenwolf and The Neo-Futurists in my hometown. National Geographic is obviously different from that, because the magazine world is absolutely nothing like the theater world. I'm grateful for the breath of fresh air, to be frank, and the opportunity to learn a new world.

There are some things these internships have in common, though. For one, they're unpaid-- the labor unionist in me rebels!-- but because they're all nonprofits, I've always swallowed my socialist politics on that one and mostly been grateful that my family can support me while I take on these weeks and months of working for free. Not everyone is so lucky. In fact, most people aren't. It's a privileged position to be able to work for free, and schools like Oberlin should do a better job of monetarily supporting the students who aren't able to do it on their own.

To be fair, working for free is what apprenticing has always been about. You give your time and work hard in exchange for access to people and trade knowledge. It's almost a fair system, if the contemporary world wasn't so dependent on the exchange of money. And in days of old, even thirteen-year-old blacksmith's assistants would get room and board, right?

I am not complaining. Like I said, I feel pretty lucky that I'm able to do this, to appease my curiosity and work hard for something I can feel proud about. Travel journalism is something I can feel proud about. Every day, I get to work in a building with banners outside proclaiming that National Geographic Society is "Your window to the world." I thought about this a lot this morning as I bounded up the stairs, a little later than I should have been due to the snow DC's just had: I get to work at your window to the world? Who's the "you" in that statement? Washington? America? The world? The world's window to the world? It gets confusing at that point.

But anyway, another thing that hung me up about it was that WINDOWS happen to be the thing I miss most when I'm interning. The way my particular cubicle and computer are arranged, I can't see a sliver of daylight. If I push back my chair about a foot from the keyboard, I can sometimes peek into a neighbor's office to look outside her window longingly-- but there's a big brick building (with the lettering "Sumner School" across its top) blocking most of the sunshine. At first, I'd liked that building. Today, day eight of working here, I just miss seeing the sky.

And when I worked at Steppenwolf last summer-- a job I loved, make no mistake-- it was a similar situation. I worked 9-5 in a cubicle, crunched on either side by two others who shared the same desk. Thank god we became friends. Only in August, after three months of interning, did I realize I'd missed the summer.

The adults reading this will probably nod knowingly or shake their heads with jaded recognition. "Yes," you're saying to yourselves, "That's what being an adult is about." Working in an office and sacrificing the seasons. "You do it to provide for yourself and your family."

Well, being an unpaid intern doesn't provide for me or my family, at least not directly. In fact, it detracts from my family's... provisions. "Well," some people will tell you, "The whole point is that you make connections now for a job later." Sure. But there's a nice girl working downstairs in the NatGeo Store who said she had eight internships before graduating college, a few after, and then couldn't find a job. She works here and at Starbucks. And that's the story I hear most often.

One thing us Gen Yers are always accused of, though, is entitlement. How dare I, goes the argument, presume that I deserve anything at all, let alone a job with a salary or, heaven forbid, health care benefits?

The answer is complicated. Growing up as perhaps the first global generation (my friends were making YouTube videos seen by viewers in Hong Kong when we were fifteen, and most of us, regardless of class, have gotten abroad at one time or another), the people I know are pretty aware of the crises facing developing countries and disasters happening with alarming regularity all over the world today. There is that knowledge, but with it comes resignation, an early strain of the lethal virus of empathetic exhaustion. We're told to care about so many things and given so few outlets to do anything about them (that are easy or widely presented, at least), that many people of all ages, but most critically my own, simply give up.

We retreat into pop culture and have collectively developed a similar sense of post-post-modern, ironic humor. Can you blame us? With so little uniting us on an international level, let alone a national one, we're grateful and excited that, meeting another twentysomething in an elevator, we might have "Doctor Who" or Neutral Milk Hotel in common. "Have you seen the latest Andy Samberg sketch?" we ask each other urgently, as if it's of vital importance to both our idea of self and of community. In a very sad but true way, it is.

But the question was one of entitlement. I was born in 1989. People around my age spent some pretty formative years in an America with a surplus, when the biggest national problem seemed to us whether Bill Clinton had cheated on his wife. I hasten to say we were the last generation pretty universally inculcated with the idea that our country was essentially good and essentially the most powerful one on earth. These things, while responsible for unpleasantness like imperialism, arrogance, and ignorance, also provide citizens with a heady sense of security and well-being.

So 2001 happens. Adults around the country are shocked. Kids around the country are confused. And us-- preteens, teenagers-- are young enough to reconfigure our worldview to include this event, not implicitly reject it as "something that doesn't happen." Guess what? It happened. Our conception of the universe was still malleable enough to account for it, so you have a generation that no longer plans for permanence. (Could this be why so many more people today get tattoos than a decade ago? It seems trivial but related to me.)

Just a few years later, the world economy collapses. We aren't shocked, we aren't panicked. Unlike our elders, who watch as their jobs disappear and their pensions dry up, we never expected those things, not really. We were told ten years ago that the world was ending with Y2k, and secretly hoped it would. It's a year until 2012 now, another beacon of hope for the world to end, and people my age are deliriously delighted with the prospect. The world ending means we can stop feeling guilty about our impotence and physically disappear, like we've always subconsciously feared and desired.

Which brings us back to internships. I have loved all my internships, and you have to, on a daily basis, appreciate them for what they are-- because what they are not is an investment. Common wisdom says the opposite, but any unemployed graduate can tell you the reality.

But see, that comes easily to me. Taking things one day at a time, planning for a month here, three months there. Nothing lasts-- nothing ever did, but today things are less stable than ever, and the process has sped up considerably. I can't even get an iPod for Christmas before the next one is already hitting the tech geek blogs.

It's not a problem, this state of evanescence, because not only is it the ultimate human condition, it's well-suited to the brains of teens and twentysomethings. The parts of our minds that plan for the long-term aren't even fully developed yet, according to my neuroscience professors. If you see a pierced hipster on the side of the road, looking altogether pretty calm about being jobless, that's probably part of it.

But what happens to us as we age? By the time people my age hit their thirties, social security might be history. By the time we recognize why something like socialized healthcare might be a pretty great idea, the time for activism might have passed us by.

It's important that people who are in their teens and twenties now try to wrap their heads around that reality. Do I think we will? Nah. Not on the whole. But if just a few of us do, and if just a few of us are willing to put that time and energy into leaving the world a better place than how we found it (I can hear laughing at the sprawling ambition of such a hope), that might be enough. At least, thinking at all about these things would be a start.

Not a real blog.

Okay, this is a little embarassing, but I mostly keep this blog for my family, friends, and some administrators at my college who asked. As a mea culpa, allow me to recommend three much more awesome bloggers I discovered this past weekend:

Listful Thinking: This is the funniest girl writing on the internet right now. That's a totally subjective opinion, and 100% based on the fact that I mad identify with her loathing of Nic Cage and Hugh Grant. She's also amazingly honest, and that's half the hilarity: she spent New Year's Eve going out in the cold, half-dressed, to buy a romance novel. I'm too embarrassed to explain how that makes us alike, but you should definitely be reading her blog. Quick, before everyone notices how awesome her writing is and she gets a book deal, etc. This way you can be all, "I read Listful Thinking before it was cool and she's much better live and the first album was better."


Edith Zimmerman/The Hairpin: Thank you, "This American Life," for pointing me here.

Anna Friedman: Blogging while taking a roadtrip west after quitting her job-- for the second time in her twenties. American hero.

Hello, blogosphere!

I am interning at National Geographic Traveler magazine for the month of January. The opportunity was offered by an Oberlin alum who's an editor there, and I found it on our Career Services website when doing a little late-night internet-surfing back in the fall. The myriad ways I procrastinate often involve looking up what to do next, which has so far served me pretty well.

I worked Monday to Friday this week, coming in between 9:30 and 11am and leaving between 4:30 and 6. It's been altogether delightful, I have to say. Totally unlike my previous work experience and internships in some ways, though those experiences have certainly informed this one. I love the constant armchair-traveling for seven hours a day. I think that's a lovely way to spend your work week, actually: looking up what to do in the Twin Cities, checking in with fellow staff on Twitter, fact-checking lists of activities in Hong Kong, proofreading an article about Brazil.

And I'm getting to know DC, as well. I'm living in a guest apartment owned by some wonderfully generous family friends in Alexandria, VA, a town just outside of the district. It's about a 20 minute bus ride to the Metro station, where I catch a 25-minute train to Farragut West, which is a stop in the northwest quadrant (DC is divided into four segments by direction) equidistant between the glorious National Geographic Society building and the White House. Apparently, President Obama and I both work in a neighborhood called "The Golden Triangle."

Favorite thing about DC so far: the plethora of food trucks! Food trucks are a trend that I don't think has hit Chicago in full force yet (at least, not to my knowledge): mobile mini-restaurants that drive around the city, stopping at various hotspots so that commuters can grab a pizza slice, gourmet cupcake, or hot chocolate on the go! Once a week, at Farragut Square just a block from where I work, something called "Farragut Fridays" happens, and five or six of these trucks station themselves temporarily around the perimeter of the park!

Yesterday, I got a slice of veggie pizza, a pumpkin spice cupcake, and hot chocolate. I have to say that I could probably find better versions of all these things in real, stationary restaurants in the area, but it was a novelty-- and pretty convenient-- to just walk out of Nat Geo and wait in the cold afternoon on line with several DC natives! How authentic, I thought, how unusual! Never mind the chill.

A Love Letter To Adolescence: HP & the Deathly Hallows, Pt. 1

I spent a huge part of late childhood and all of adolescence comforted by the world of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books. I know there were adult fans back in the ’90s and early ’00s, and I know the series is introduced to uncountable children with every passing year.

But for my generation— for the kids who grew up with the specter of terrorism and the total powerlessness we felt as a President embroiled the world in a series of wars and the internet changed every facet of our lives— Harry Potter has always been a constant, a spiritual salve for the lost, the frightened, the kids who went through a decade unlike any other. And even now, though we’ve entered an uncomfortable adulthood, it often feels like just another costume.

On nights like last— when the penultimate midnight showing of a Harry Potter film erupts theaters across the country and across the world with squeals of delight from people my age, saddled with the reputation of apathy and social awkwardness and fair accusations of political ennui— something falls into place. We are, for one of a dozen times that is drawing to an irrevocable close, again a community. We clap at the same places. We trill knowing laughs at all the right parts. We let our personal opinions be known, loud and clear, and share the crazy joys of returning to a place we all feel like was partially invented by us.

I made the joke in passing to a friend this morning that I grew up in a place called the Internet of Crazy, and for me and a lot of others my age, that place was filled with Harry Potter. We discussed its obscurest points, debated its most mysterious corners, had an encyclopedic knowledge of the books that scared our parents.

But time marches on. Later and later, we come to understand that Harry Potter, though it was unique, though it remains a remarkable phenomenon, though it felt like it was a wonder that would never cease, must necessarily become a relic of our past. I tutor fourteen-year-olds who have only seen the movies, and tell me they don’t really “get it.” Some of us who were 10 and 11 when the first book came out have children of our own now.

I maintain that there was nothing comparable to the Harry Potter series, and what it was for us. That’s partially due to the inconceivable stresses and undupliacatable tensions of when these books were coming out, and partially due to the unquestionable talent, grace, skill, and gentleness that J.K. Rowling had. Creating a world so complete and so richly tapestried with metaphors of our own that we wanted to live there before we knew that we did required a tenderness and an understanding missing from most books, and even some parents. She taught acceptance, mercy, bravery, logic, and most importantly, she taught us— as the greatest teachers do— how to cope with the twin mysteries of love and death.

Rowling deserves all the praise she has ever received, and more, and better. But beyond her and her legacy, its moving chronicle of loss and longing, are us, the children for which it was written. I will always have a soft place in my heart for the people born between roughly 1986 and 1993 for this. Born in 1989, I was 10 the first time I picked up Harry Potter, and twelve when the Twin Towers fell down. Can adults of the age understand this? Can posterity?

Everyone has a history. For me, and for the other millions of us who dressed our no-longer-childlike bodies in the faded robes and silly slogan shirts that claimed our identity as “fans” (how unfair, the smallness of that word for such richness of experience!), flying our freak flags high enough to be seen from space, proud and unashamed, we were calling to that shared history, hoping to see a glimmer of it reflected back at us onscreen. Maybe we did. But more important than the movie was the experience of the movie, our story, the one we will have for the rest of our lives to look back on. We will try to make sense of how we felt and what we did, and to a large degree might be unable to satisfy our older selves with recollection. That’s why it’s necessary to celebrate now, in all ways and every way, and while we can, what this culture was and is for us.

And when it ends next summer, it will be a small death. We will grow up. Those of us who’ve kept the warm glow of the series close by for more than half our lives will shed it, like a cloak that got too small. We know this. At the theater last night, there were cries of, “Only one more movie until my childhood is over!”

We are aware of the loss. Thankfully, Rowling taught us, before we had to learn, how to live with losses. The profound quality of the losses she described is not absent from this one. That’s why nights like last are so important: so beautiful, so precious, so ephemeral. They are the few and far between moments of our lives when we are sharply aware of all that we have and all that we were. The passion and excitement is an elegy to itself. Celebrate while you can.

Forgot my journals...

Well, in the hassle of moving back to Oberland from a near-perfect summer in Chicago, I accidentally left my poor journals at home. It's been a little disastrous, because I use journals as cheap therapy, art class, and scrapbook-like documentary all in one. And the first two weeks of senior year have been rife with madness to deconstruct.

One thing I will say--that I wish I had my journals for to ruminate on, though this blog will do in the meantime--is that I've become totally preoccupied with mountains and glaciers and Antarctica recently. I often think like this, getting really involved with an idea or image before knowing quite what it means. A little like dreaming, or like thinking in metaphors come up with by someone else.

The background on my computer is of some fjords and mountains in Norway, and my 2011 wall calendar is images from Antarctica. I don't know what this means. But I'd be willing to hear guesses...