Obviously Read online

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  Two years before the pie incident, I had just moved back home to Kentucky from Florida. The media would inaccurately describe this phenomenon as “boomeranging.” The idea was that after graduating college, us wittle, coddled babies missed the teat and after being shoved into the “real world” returned home to purposely avoid having to grow up. The truth wasn’t so convoluted: millennials were graduating into the eye of the recession, and paper degrees from renowned universities proved to be not so buoyant.

  It was 2010, and after a miserable eight months of post-graduation poverty in Orlando—never squelched no matter how many jobs (three) or Craigslist gigs (countless) I suffered—I threw my hands in the air and returned to the Bluegrass State if only to make enough money (sans rent bill) to stop the incessant collection calls regarding my never-used, still in-the-box degree.

  The opportunity to jump the Disney ship came after I sent my résumé to the Museum Center in Cincinnati on a whim one evening. The pay was $50,000 (a fortune to me, a girl sleeping on an inflatable mattress) and would offer me freedom to create videos, take photos, and run the social media sites for the massive institution. I had an initial phone interview (taken on my Net10 phone because my Blackberry got stolen at work one night) and immediately was asked to come in for an IRL interview.

  “I’m moving home in a few weeks, so this is perfect. I can fly home early to meet with you,” I lied. But I needed a job. I needed them to believe me so I could pull myself up by my bootstraps, even though at this point I didn’t even have boots.

  Anything I could sell, I did: a table in my room, a side table from Ikea, a few lamps and picture frames. I left a duvet, and any clothes that were too thick to fit in my suitcases, and a note on the fridge that I was moving on. My roommates understood, as our lease was up in a month and only half of the apartment was still on a speaking basis because Clarice brought bed bugs into our home and refused to pay for it.

  I bought my ticket at the airport, cashing in on a three-hundred-dollar insurance settlement after being rear-ended the year before. In hindsight, that whiplash and ambulance ride were a true blessing in disguise. Sometimes my neck still gets sore, but I needed that three hundred dollars to get the eff out of Florida.

  After I unpacked, my mother drove me to the job interview (I had sold my car to afford moving to Florida and had no way of buying a new one). I wore what I called my “interview outfit”: a red jacket with three-quarter-length sleeves and chic black buttons, and a black-and-white-checkered dress with black flats. I smiled and seemed interested and gave them ideas for how to build a presence online that matched their presence in the community.

  I didn’t get the job. My social media predilection did not prove equal to actual experience in social media marketing.

  There was so much embarrassment in coming back. I’ve grown enough to realize that no one was so consumed with my whereabouts or whyabouts, but at the time it felt like all of my internet acquaintances could smell my sadness. Every question about why I moved back home felt less curious than accusatory. Everyone thinks you’re a failure. They know you didn’t “make it” in Orlando was the song stuck in my head every time I browsed back to Facebook.

  This feeling of utter loserdom compounded when the only job I could find immediately upon returning home was at the Justice in the mall. Justice as a store is fine. It’s an explosion of pink and purple and sparkles designed to empty the bank accounts of every parent of a cool girl aged zero to thirteen. If there’s a doll, lip gloss, candy, band, or hair accessory worth coveting in those middle school halls, it was purchased at Justice.

  When I was a kid, Justice was called Limited Too, and I was always too fat and poor for their clothes. There was no point in buying a twenty-dollar T-shirt that I would outgrow over the course of a lazy summer, and because I hit puberty a full two years before most of my peers, the clothes always took on a pornographic appearance on my body. I hated that store. But to add insult to injury: I was twenty-one, and I was working in the same mall I did when I was fifteen.

  I was grateful for the paycheck and got to work with my friends from my summer stint at Forever 21 four years prior, but I needed real money. If I was to be covered head to toe in glitter of my own volition, I needed to be making more than eight dollars an hour. My mom had to drive me to and from work every day, and she charged me gas money. This was understandable, but it took my weekly earnings down to three hundred dollars, and there was no viable way out.

  Every night after work I’d come home and get on my three-year-old dinosaur Dell laptop and pray that it hadn’t accrued another virus. I’d spend hours each night copying and pasting my cover letter into message fields and meticulously combing through to make sure the addressee was consistent with the application. Sometimes these sessions would last hours and would only end after I too quickly applied for a job, sending the uninspiring “please see my résumé attached” note without attaching a résumé.

  I wasn’t making YouTube videos, either. While I had uploaded a few back in Orlando, my fifty-dollar webcam had given up, and after breaking my camera and selling it for dinner one night, I had no way of shooting and editing anything.

  Lost, desperate, and tired of having a degree burning in my pocket, but apparently not being qualified yet to work the cash register, I made my full-time job applying for jobs. One evening after work I checked my inbox and had a message from a local water and coffee company. They’d liked my résumé and cover letter and wanted me to come in for an interview.

  The next day I called out of work, suited up (the red jacket/checkered dress combo), and rode shotgun to a suburb north of Cincinnati to the quaint warehouse with offices adjacent.

  A bell sounded as I opened the door to the building, and a homely woman with a few missing teeth asked me if I was picking up or dropping off. Confused, I told her that I was there for an interview.

  “Oh! I’ll get Bobby!” she said, buzzing me into the office.

  The room seemed like a small set for an ’80s movie. Everyone there had that sort of poofy front bang you only see in less cosmopolitan places and fit perfectly in their beige cubicles and dark carpet—the kind of carpet I only remember seeing in preschool and doctor’s office waiting rooms. I’d hate to put Orlando on a pedestal, but even that city had made the switch back to hardwood floors by now and this was all too retro.

  Bobby came to meet me only a moment later and escorted me into the conference room that, too, felt confusingly old. He was a tall, handsome man in his early forties with reddish hair and an enormous smile. I took my seat, and Roger, a slightly older man with salt-and-pepper hair and glasses, joined.

  I assumed since I had the CEO and the CFO present we’d begin the interview, but we waited for a woman named Helga. She lumbered into the room and sat down in a huff, giving off a terrible, sea-witch first impression.

  “All right! All right, let’s get started,” she sneered. I immediately disliked her.

  You know that thing where you meet a person and there’s just something about them, their face, their smell, the way they look at you, something, that just gives you an intuitive desire to avoid them at all costs even though you’re trying not to judge a book by its cover? It was like that. And you should trust that instinct. The line of questioning was standard but long-winded, and my mind drifted, picturing Marilynn driving back toward Kentucky, tired of waiting an hour for her kid to dazzle a bunch of strangers at a company she’s never heard of.

  But finally, Bobby popped the question.

  “Is thirty-five thousand enough?” he offered. I tried to be cool about it.

  “Yeah, that sounds about right.”

  And with that I was shaking hands and grabbing a free cup of coffee, and Bobby even walked out to the car to meet my mom, who hadn’t left my ass in a moment of weakness or for something to help her diabetic blood sugar from going too
low.

  It wasn’t all downhill from there. I got my own big sunlight-drenched office that I could decorate however I wanted. Bobby knew that I couldn’t be a star social media manager without a Mac computer, an iPad, a brand-new DSLR camera, and a company Blackberry. In an instant I had everything I needed to make my dreams come true.

  Well, my mom was still driving me to work every day, which became a teaseable offense in the office. I was the youngest employee by at least a decade, the only black person not working in the warehouse, and no one understood me. Helga seethed with jealousy, immediately becoming the meanest of the bunch. Why didn’t she have a private office? How come her computer was an old PC like everyone else’s?

  The sad part is I get it. I’d be pissed, too, if I worked somewhere for fifteen years and after five minutes some new, non-sea-witch girl got all the fun toys and privacy. I get it. But I also get that it’s not my fault she didn’t have her own office and that she had no idea how to work Apple products. I am a feminist, I think women should have everything men get, but I also wasn’t about to give up being doted on to a woman with no manners, who burped out loud in the office and who started all of the drama, all while being alarmingly unaware of how long her nose hairs had gotten.

  One major plus of my mom being a saint and driving me forty miles to work every day was that we got closer.

  “I didn’t make thirty-five thousand till I was in my thirties.” She beamed. We’d spend our car rides thinking about how to decorate the office, what cool accessories young tech people would have, and how to really be the role. I’ve found that the solution to imposter syndrome for me is to treat life like a scene in a movie. Oh, I’m not ready to build a local brand into the local brand on Facebook? Well, I look damn good in these new, trendy clothes and will spend any downtime at work reading articles by more educated people about the work I’m supposed to be doing.

  And I did do work. Sure, it was mostly writing my own blog and editing videos and pictures I’d use on my own social accounts to try to become an influencer, but I also created all the social media accounts and ran successful contests and giveaways and made the newsletters and promotional content beautiful. Plus, keeping up the appearance of working hard when Helga and others burst in the door without knocking was its own full-time job.

  After a month or two I’d saved enough money to buy a laptop for editing my pictures and videos. I’d had the company get the programs I’d need to stay competitive online. Adobe Creative Suite, Microsoft Office. Just a couple months after that I’d buy a Nissan Cube with high payments, thanks to my dumpy credit from not having gainful employment straight out of school.

  It’s crazy to me that in America we’re expected to pay back our education immediately. Six months is not a buffer. Six months isn’t long enough to get a promotion at most jobs, so why on earth would we implore people to pay back thousands of dollars before they have it? What a nightmare.

  Anyway, it took me nine months to really be sick of the job. I’d gotten back on my feet, I went from owing everybody money to owing everybody less money, and people were starting to ask me to write for their blogs. I’d come to an impasse: I could continue down this path, find myself at this company twenty years later, having slowly turned into a sea witch, but having made enough money to feel successful in my hometown. I could marry a guy I went to high school with, send my kids to the same schools I’d gone to. Never vacation farther than Chicago. Be in bed early on weeknights and go out to the same bars every weekend. I’d built a great group of friends around myself. My friend Erica would always be the coolest person in Cincinnati and would help me meet bands that toured through our town and I’d get free drinks forever. It wasn’t totally unappealing. That would have been enough.

  But just like in college, I had expectations for my life, and I was done feeling stifled by my means and my location. I wanted an opportunity to really compete. I wanted a YouTube video with more than a few thousand views. I wanted to start fresh somewhere no one knew me and then make them meet me. And to me, that was New York. It was Brooklyn. It was living with strangers, and learning the subway system, and being young and broke among artists, not young and well paid for the area and staying in my mom’s house until I found love or she got tired of me. I wanted mythical young adulthood. I wanted to take a risk and feel success on my terms.

  So I saved for a few more months, I gave notice, and with two suitcases and a couple grand in my pocket, I took the leap. I could see how the rest of my life would play out in Cincinnati. I decided not knowing in New York would be a better option.

  How to Literally Get to New York

  Why does bus travel sound so romantic? Like trains in a Wes Anderson movie, buses always seem like a beautiful, vintage way to see America. Flying above for a few hours, America just looks like a poorly sewn together pattern of greens and browns with the occasionally stunning blue lake or less stunning brown river. It’s too far away to look like anything meaningful.

  No, it’s buses that give you a gritty view of what America is really like. Passing schools, churches, and mom-and-pop restaurants and taking highways with numbers that don’t quite fit together like the familiar ones in your state. When you’re riding along, you can take in the signs welcoming you to states personally, with some colorful cursive on a bridge or in the middle of the woods.

  This is what I convinced myself when I tried to find a ticket from Cincinnati to New York. “Who can beat a thirteen-hour trip with so much charm and for only ninety dollars?” Surely, if I had an extra four hundred dollars to spare, flying in a middle seat next to the bathroom would have been far more charming.

  I knew I was going to move to New York, but after moving to Orlando with no employment lined up and the desperation of asking the insurance company of the woman who rear-ended me months prior for a paltry three hundred dollars for the whiplash/to pay my rent on time for once, I knew I had to have a job or at least a sense of how to get one before I could leave home again.

  For weeks I scoured New York’s Craigslist job ads, trying to decide if I could justify leaving a cushy job in Cincinnati and living rent free (but paying the cable bill and for my car each month, to be sure) to start over in America’s largest city, filled with talented people who probably went to that Fame high school, able to meet people with apartments not in basements while figuring out how to get headshots and also discern good coffee from boiled floor remnants.

  I wasn’t super convinced of my abilities to do or be any of those things, but I wanted to be as sure as I could be before I made the move. Scrolling became my favorite after (and during) work activity. How much would an apartment cost with three roommates? How much would I have to make to be able to afford everything and also be able to actually buy things for myself every once in a while? I did the algebra that in high school they told us we’d use every day for the rest of our lives. Rent divided by roommates multiplied by MetroCards minus food minus laundry minus, minus, minus. Factoring in the three hundred dollars I got from my insurance company after my fender bender, I figured I’d just need to get rear-ended forty-five more times to be able to live like a character on Girls.

  This was in the Tumblr days of the internet when you could ask a person a question and they would answer it directly, usually without GIFs and political assumptions. You could get a better sense of who someone was than the foofy Instagram faux-advice of today. Shitty webcam photos led to revealing, true blog posts that were about anything and everything. Facetune hadn’t become so popular that zits became obsolete on the timeline. Sharing was earnest and not a corporate buzzword to be used in place of “generating revenue.” So it was no surprise that I had become fast friends with Jennifer Woods, an it-girl of the moment who had just been hired at a huge comedy show in shiny New York City. After all, a twentysomething celebrity stripped of fancy lighting and wardrobe and makeup artists is just a twentysomething, and I knew something about being one. I sent
her a mixture of fan mail and general curiosity:

  “Can you tell me what it was like moving to New York?” I submitted, pretending I wasn’t refreshing my homepage for the moment she answered my question.

  She never directly answered my question, but I remember the night I got the notification that she had followed me back, thinking, “Wow, I must be doing something right!”

  She sent me a message shortly after becoming the most coveted thing you can be in these times: a mutual. I clicked so fast my off-brand laptop threatened to run its loud and ineffective fan.

  “Hey! Cool hair. I’m deciding if I’m going to go natural and you’ve helped a ton, chica!” she wrote.

  Sure, it wasn’t my sense of humor, which I assumed she must have some stronger handle on than anyone else—being only twenty-two and landing such a major gig—but my hairdo that she found worthy of pressing “follow” that night. But I didn’t care. So when months later she posted about looking for a roommate who wasn’t an ax murderer, I thought we could totally make it happen.

  I swear we’re going to get back to the bus thing. Please indulge my detour.

  A New York–based social media agency (that totally doesn’t exist anymore) posted an ad looking for an individual to make an entertaining video about why they should be hired to manage other soon-to-be-nonexistent startups’ Facebook pages. I was a shoo-in. After nearly a year of running a brand’s social media pages, I learned that the one thing it was impossible to do was inspire people to make a video. It seemed too daunting. We had a contest once where the rules were simple: you submit a video of you making a cup of coffee by using a Keurig machine (which is literally just pressing a button). Our newsletter had more than one hundred thousand subscribers. Surely any of these people could use their cell phones to take videos of them pushing a button to win a thousand dollars, a new Keurig machine, and box seats at an NFL game with an unlimited buffet.