Jobs I Could Do

I've been out of college for seven months, obsessively Craigslisting apartments on the West Coast for a year*, and staring at the microscopic number in my measly savings account for the past twenty minutes. Don't get me wrong-- I'm loving every second of freelance writing and videoblogging and making content for Gurl and My Damn Channel. I'm paying the bills (for the most part) and working hard (for the most part) and doing everything I ought to be doing (eh), but if I want to live somewhere perpetually sunny and where the majority of pedestrians don't don bald eagle-emblazoned sweatpants, it may be time to consider a job on the side. Unfortunately, my bachelor's degree is in "Creative Writing" and "Gender Studies" and essentially qualifies me to talk about my feelings and fill out coloring books, so below is a list of side jobs I think I could handle.

Side jobs I think I could handle:

• High class prostitute who only gets hired by old retirees who physically can't have sex and just want to pay young women $200,000 a year to sit by a pool and drink mimosas
• Manicurist at one of those expensive salons where rich white ladies want to talk to you about their neighbors' husbands' affairs for so long that they overstay their appointments and tip generously
• Jillian Michaels impersonator, provided I don't actually have to work out and my job just entails watching exhausted people jog on a treadmill and shouting "You disgust me!" intermittently
• Cat psychic
• A cat's sidekick in a movie about a superhero cat and me, her clumsy-but-lovable best friend
• Alternatively, the screenwriter for the cat superhero movie
• Personal assistant/shopper for a cat actor (is the one who played Sassy in Homeward Bound available/alive?)**
• Porn actress-- catering only to food fetishes-- and only if I don't have to show my face-- and only if I don't have to use my real name-- and only if all I have to do is eat 35-cent Oriental ramen on camera
• Plant watcher (Note: I have proven multiple times my inability to keep plants alive, so only hire me if you are in the market for someone to just literally look at your plants)
• Snarky livetweeter (will occasionally write "Buy Oreos or something!" in between my speculations as to whether an 83-year-old Christopher Plummer would go out with me-- for a fee of $5,000/tweet plus Oreos)
• Celebrity baby namer (I predicted "North West" months in advance and if that's not a marketable skill then I can't fathom what is)
• Starbucks

So if you can offer me any of those positions along with fantastic health benefits, occasional doughnuts, and leniency if I sometimes stop working to record myself talking about Honey Boo Boo, I'm all yours. Until then, I'll be here... refreshing Craiglist and using my diploma as an 80,000-dollar tea coaster.


P.S. I put up a new video a few days ago!

*Are you aware that you can get away with calling an apartment a "two-bedroom" if there's a large enough closet in the bathroom for someone to feasibly sleep in it if they were strapped, standing, to a hotel cot?

**No word on Sassy's breathing status, but she does have a very descriptive wiki page

Doing What I Like To Do

Wouldn't it be a hoot if I posted something on here, for the first time in a year or something, without mentioning it to anyone? Wouldn't it be a hoot if I started saying "hoot?"

There's something really weird about a twenty-two-year-old woman writing in the same blog that contains her high-school-sophomore angst. I feel like I'm disturbing a haunted tomb or something. If I make too much noise, the puffy-haired ghost of Teenage Hayley might climb out of my laptop screen The Ring-style and yell at me for liking Top 40 and be disappointed that I still haven't figured out how to shape my eyebrows. In fact, I can name at least fifty things she'd berate me for. Some examples:

• I'm not a rich and famous author and I don't really desire to be one
• I'm not married to my friend's guitar-playing big brother (he now has a really trashy upper arm tattoo of the name of the city we grew up in; dodged a bullet there)
• I don't eat cheese
• I don't think enjoying reality TV is a symptom of being stupid
• I own a romper
• I maybe voted for Nader in 2008?

We still like Chipotle and Harry Potter and thinking we're better than everyone, though, so not all is lost. Anyway, this just feels weird. Typing this. Posting this. Like driving by a house you used to live in and knowing exactly how many stairs are inside but also knowing you're not allowed to go in. 

I used to make lists here-- about things I wanted to accomplish or how I wanted to improve myself-- and jotting one down on a Panera napkin this afternoon is what reminded me of this old abandoned blog. One of my present-day goals (alongside learning to actually wash dishes instead of rationalizing that you can use the same bowl over and over if you never take it downstairs) is to do things I like to do. I like reading and listening to the radio and wearing jewelry and eating spinach, so why do I avoid doing those things? Writing about my life is not a chore. It's something I like to do. But I've stopped doing it.

I think it's because I have a hard time treating the present like it's a real thing that really counts. Right now I'm saving money (in theory... trying to... thinking about starting to...) so I can move to Los Angeles and Begin My Real Life, but I know I need to stop thinking that way. I treated high school like the purgatory before college, and college like the waiting room before adulthood, and now I keep thinking of my bedroom and my car and my clothes and my city as temporary. That's so unhealthy! Now is the only now. And even though that sounds like the title of a bad '80s rock ballad, it's how I'm trying to live from here on out. Ohio isn't LA but it's still real life. So I'm going to spend my real life doing what I like to do. I'm going to wear dresses and have living plants around the house and talk to human beings. And maybe, like, write in a blog. Maybe.

Is that cool with you, fifteen-year-old self?