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Authors: Meghan Daum
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former actress who was now pursuing a career writing children’s musicals about the rodeo circuit. She charged me $800 a month, and I worked out an arrangement with my parents wherein I paid half and they paid half. Astonishingly, I managed to be frugal enough to hold up my end on my $200-a-week income.
It was a hot, hungry, lonely, glorious summer. I was twenty years old, and my life felt like a vast ocean before me. I loved having a real job and living in the city. Though there was no air-conditioning and I had cheap, unflattering work clothes and was so strapped for cash that when I spilled my dinner on the floor one night, I went to bed famished because there wasnothing else in the cupboards and I literally couldn’t afford to go out and buy a sandwich, I found myself in a state of unparalleled happiness. I loved the buzz of the office, loved the table and chairs on the tar rooftop of the brownstone, and loved the smell of ammonia on the sidewalks outside the Korean grocery markets in the morning.
I loved the people at work so much I wanted to round them up and yoke them to my shoulders as I plowed my way into adulthood. Though I would later realize that most of them were fairly ordinary New Yorkers trying to live decently on the middling salaries of the nonprofit world, I saw them at the time as wildly sophisticated. From my desk in the office, where I typed address labels and stuffed envelopes with a glee I’d never known before, I observed their behavior and listened to them talk on the phone. As far as I was concerned, I was researching the role of my future self. I had crushes on all of them: the men and the women, the old and the young, the glamorous, high-rolling executives and the Brylcreemed accountant. At night, as I drifted off in the airless berth of the sleeping loft, the echoes of their voices in my head were as soothing as the sirens outside.
When my sublet ended in mid-August, I moved back to Ridgewood for a few weeks and completed my internship by commuting to the Port Authority on the Short Line bus. When that was over, I packed up and returned to Vassar. The under-whelm was palpable. The school, which had long ago started to feel like some kind of amusement park for overgrown adolescents, now seemed to have shrunk into an architectural model of itself. It was hard to say what felt more oppressive, the self-congratulatory pride the place took in its ability to offer both limitless freedom and near-foolproof safety or thefact it attracted so much wealth that one student had an original Warhol on the wall of his dorm room.
Despite my new level of exasperation with Vassar, I had a good semester, the best of my whole college experience by far. I lived with three friends in a unit of modern-looking campus apartments designated for upperclassmen. Normally, this housing, which had an open, multilevel design I’ve always associated with late-1970s-era condos in which groovy singles with feather earrings would play Christopher Cross albums, was reserved for seniors. I, however, had been allowed to enter the housing lottery with three senior friends, and to our delight we’d been granted an apartment. In a statement of opposition against the cult of covering the walls with tapestries and/or huge posters depicting high-contrast black-and-white art photographs, we refused to decorate at all. We were righteous minimalists.
Soon, however, I found myself caught inside yet another escape fantasy.
I did not want to be a college student anymore; I wanted to be a working person living in New York. Now that I had tasted independence, now that I’d known the exultation of turning a key in the solid, wheezing front door of a brownstone, now that I’d known life under the vast canopy of the city, the smallness of the college bordered on the intolerable. In desperation (though perhaps in a stroke of genius?) I applied for and received a one-semester transfer to NYU. I called my beloved colleagues from the Lincoln
It was a hot, hungry, lonely, glorious summer. I was twenty years old, and my life felt like a vast ocean before me. I loved having a real job and living in the city. Though there was no air-conditioning and I had cheap, unflattering work clothes and was so strapped for cash that when I spilled my dinner on the floor one night, I went to bed famished because there wasnothing else in the cupboards and I literally couldn’t afford to go out and buy a sandwich, I found myself in a state of unparalleled happiness. I loved the buzz of the office, loved the table and chairs on the tar rooftop of the brownstone, and loved the smell of ammonia on the sidewalks outside the Korean grocery markets in the morning.
I loved the people at work so much I wanted to round them up and yoke them to my shoulders as I plowed my way into adulthood. Though I would later realize that most of them were fairly ordinary New Yorkers trying to live decently on the middling salaries of the nonprofit world, I saw them at the time as wildly sophisticated. From my desk in the office, where I typed address labels and stuffed envelopes with a glee I’d never known before, I observed their behavior and listened to them talk on the phone. As far as I was concerned, I was researching the role of my future self. I had crushes on all of them: the men and the women, the old and the young, the glamorous, high-rolling executives and the Brylcreemed accountant. At night, as I drifted off in the airless berth of the sleeping loft, the echoes of their voices in my head were as soothing as the sirens outside.
When my sublet ended in mid-August, I moved back to Ridgewood for a few weeks and completed my internship by commuting to the Port Authority on the Short Line bus. When that was over, I packed up and returned to Vassar. The under-whelm was palpable. The school, which had long ago started to feel like some kind of amusement park for overgrown adolescents, now seemed to have shrunk into an architectural model of itself. It was hard to say what felt more oppressive, the self-congratulatory pride the place took in its ability to offer both limitless freedom and near-foolproof safety or thefact it attracted so much wealth that one student had an original Warhol on the wall of his dorm room.
Despite my new level of exasperation with Vassar, I had a good semester, the best of my whole college experience by far. I lived with three friends in a unit of modern-looking campus apartments designated for upperclassmen. Normally, this housing, which had an open, multilevel design I’ve always associated with late-1970s-era condos in which groovy singles with feather earrings would play Christopher Cross albums, was reserved for seniors. I, however, had been allowed to enter the housing lottery with three senior friends, and to our delight we’d been granted an apartment. In a statement of opposition against the cult of covering the walls with tapestries and/or huge posters depicting high-contrast black-and-white art photographs, we refused to decorate at all. We were righteous minimalists.
Soon, however, I found myself caught inside yet another escape fantasy.
I did not want to be a college student anymore; I wanted to be a working person living in New York. Now that I had tasted independence, now that I’d known the exultation of turning a key in the solid, wheezing front door of a brownstone, now that I’d known life under the vast canopy of the city, the smallness of the college bordered on the intolerable. In desperation (though perhaps in a stroke of genius?) I applied for and received a one-semester transfer to NYU. I called my beloved colleagues from the Lincoln
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