LXXVII. The Real World Called & They Want Their Blazer Back -

I should make a Google Alerts, keep my flash drives by my side, write up cover letters, keep track of references, make connections on LinkedIn with calculated measure, and make sure to use my fingertip every once a while to tap on the phone’s e-mail icon.

I tap the keyboard furiously and with authority, channeling my energy into my cover letter, as if a pleasant scent that gives off, you can count on her to be well-dressed, thoughtful, hard-working, and punctual, will begin to emanate from me electronic submission.

My vestiges of clipped nails and skin, are tapping continuously while I read over all my application materials, each individually tailored as they were because recycling does not do justice to my value.

As I sit at my desk, an unpaid intern, frustrated with the isolated times when inactivity presents itself immediately after I have completed my previously documented tasks, I think to myself:

I am not being graded. Why am I stressed? It’s not like I have to mentally prepare myself every time I open the bookmarked pagethat stares me in the face as it is forever and always on my browser, the browser that is open so long as my laptop is on.

School suddenly seems like you’re being proactive in reaching that ultimate goal.

Sitting in that library, behind that desk, cocking that pen ever so gently amongst those non-tapping fingers…This all succeeded in displacing me to a place but a few miles away from that long awaited income.

I thought my blazer would have the same effect, but it doesn’t.

The blazer dresses me up, makes me feel executive-like. The blazer dressed me up, even when I was wearing my “2012” Ivy sweatpants and walking around campus after midnight.

The blazer is quite luxurious, yet it seems to hold in the cold more than it heeds the law of physics which mandates that the friction between the blazer’s lining and my skin, provides warmth.

The blazer is like the real world - both are blatantly ill-conceived identities.

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The real world called and they want their blazer back -

Though I felt closer to the career goal, ideal income, and perfect standard of living, while a student, that too was ill-conceived.

This is the real world: you can keep the blazer.

Thanks!

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Midway through this first dual, post-grad-internship season, and preparing for the next two seasons, it seems that the education, graduate school, which cues in career can only be attained via: the accumulation of subway stories and lapses of time where my e-mail is refreshed every two minutes in anticipation of carrying out the boss’s spontaneous demands.

The blazer brought me outside of the daydreaming realm, the realm in which studying into the wee hours of the morning(s) induces a delirium where I am having pseudo-interviews in war-torn countries, writing in a home-office with a wedding band on my right ring finger, and am sooner or later reading an acceptance speech for winning the Nobel prize.

The blazer has brought me into the borough of Manhattan, physically closer to the goal then before.

The blazer has set me apart from the errand-going crowd using the New York City transit system -

So, no matter how young I look, I am still a twenty-something-year-old working (unpaid) woman in the land of my birth, my home forever, and the center of the hybrid professional-academic world, New York City.