21st Century Brontë #3 by Brontë Bettencourt
The Money Problem
I work a standard, grown-up 9-5 job, with an hour off for lunch. Management trusts me and my fellow workers to get our time-sensitive work done efficiently and accurately. There aren’t cameras monitoring us, nor a mechanized system with which we clock in and out every day.
I work for an unemployment office. There’s room to grow and improve, and if I want to, I could eventually become a hearing representative–to represent our clients at the assigned hearings. Or I could be an account executive.
My current responsibilities, you ask? I schedule hearings, send out mail, and coordinate information between the representative and the client. It’s pretty chill.
If one wanted to, one could make a satisfying career out of this totally relevant and reasonable job.
But then why does Daria Morgendorffer’s words resonate with me still?
From 1997-2001 on Mtv, the high schooler Daria responded to others and her environment with biting, deadpan sarcasm, critiquing the disappointing social constructs that ruled her world.
I didn’t really think about this quotation myself until after college.
Was there a point to attend college, accumulate over $30,000 in student debt, only to secure a job that doesn’t much utilize any of the skills I’ve learned? All the extracurricular activity, including running the English Honor Society and the Anime and Japanese Culture Club, and all my study and writing and examinations have resulted in a standard, 40-hour work week.
I had been told that classes, internships, and extracurricular are all stepping stones to careers in our field.
In a good story, the struggle leads to a meaningful climax, a resolution based on the particular, individual character of the hero. If I stay in this job and advance the ladder of achievement here, will I have made it by the standards of my family and friends? By my own standards?
If you’ve ever played The Sims, the game where you create characters and their surrounding environment, you’d be familiar with their goals. Aside from making sure that their basic human needs meters are filled, there are then wants and fears that each Sim has. These can consist of small hopes such as calling another Sim or buying a new television, and you earn different amounts of points depending on the emotional weight of that need being met. But each Sim has an overall major goal of their life. Do they want to raise 5 children? Be at the top of their career track? Sleep with 10 other Sims? If you can complete their major life goal, the meter that fills with Sims Points will turn stark white and freeze for the remainder of their life.
They are permanently happy. You have done it! They can pass on from their animated Sim life totally content.
Or not.
Maybe happiness is in the wanting, in the striving, in the questioning.
Writers are notorious for being unemployed, or struggling to find work to pay their bills. There is something deeply ironic that my job is about the determinations made about who will or will not receive unemployment benefits. By all rights, I should be a client more than an employee here.
For many writers, teaching pays the bills. Or almost pays the bills, the academic workplace relying more and more on poorly paid adjunct and lecturer positions. For me to go broke being a teacher, I would need to take out more loans to get an MFA, and then a PhD, in order to hope for teaching work.
Maybe this unemployment job is the perfect job for a writer. Maybe I can learn a lot here, and pay my bills, and find that elusive balance between writing and the rest of the necessities of life. Or maybe find happiness in the wanting, in the striving, in the questioning.
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Brontë Bettencourt (Episode 34) graduated from the University of Central Florida with a Bachelors in English Creative Writing. When she’s not writing or working, she is a full time Dungeon Master and Youtube connoisseur.
The Drunken Odyssey 
Maybe you should write a story about your job and then have a friend draw a webcomic about it. As for student loans, I suggest making an excel spreadsheet. Have a column for each account/interest rate, for each row display the daily interest accrued, and there’s a lot more stuff you can do, but it’s a great way to track and estimate the effect the timing of your payments have on paying off your loans. I’d also recommended looking up strategies for paying off student loans. I use the “Avalance” method, where you use most of your payments towards the account with the highest interest rate first then going to the next highest interest rate and so forth to minimize your payments towards interest and more to lowering your principal instead. I still have a lot more to learn about Finance, but I feel that method of payment is common sense, granted, if you can afford it in the short-term, but it will benefit you in the long-term for all the money you’ll save from not paying as much interest if you didn’t allocate the bulk of your payments to the highest interest rate account first.
My dream job was to be like Tails and make my own aircraft/spacecraft, then pilot them myself. I’m still far from that and I’m not sure if I’ll ever reach that goal. I just finished an internship that I originally had no intention of doing, but overtime, I’m glad I did it. It wasn’t work directly related to my aerospace engineering degree, but it was work that was part of the process of producing civilian aircraft. I processed a lot of documents needed to make changes on avionics software aboard aircraft. It was kinda boring, but interesting, and I took it as knowledge I could use in the future. But applicable job skills aside, the most important lesson from my internship that I took with me was that it confirmed my feelings that I didn’t care what job I had, as long as it was something that I could get better at, that I could use as a marketable skill to get another job and learn even more skills, and as long as I loves the people I worked with.
Sonic the Hedgehog is my hero. Why? He’s cool, brave, always there for Hus friends, and he takes life on the fast lane as it comes. He’s aloof but still caring and all that matters to him is he’s free to be himself and live his life the way he pleases. He is the embodiment of Freedom. He is my role model who I aspire to be like. Hell, I like a lot of cool guys. Looking back on it, I’m glad I got casted as Soul instead of Haru. 😉
If there’s anything I’ve been reaffirmed this year, it’s that you can’t look back with regrets. You can look back on fond memories, just don’t miss it as if they’re the only Golden Age you’ll ever have in life. Life is short, yet I have moments of déjà vu where I feel like that moment has happened to me before in another lifetime. People always ask “What if?” questions about how their life could’ve been different. I look at life as an infinite universes of timelines, but I think the only thing that matters to me is that I. Am. Me. That I’m happy with who I am. And I know, I’d be just as happy if I was raised differently, all that matters is to grasp awareness of my own existence and being in control of it.
People may see *NSYNC as teen pop cheese, but their music is almost like the Beethovens for pop music of my generation growing up. If you have people who stop you from being who you wanna be just because they don’t have the guts to take a chance to be their own hero or champion of their own freedom, you gotta say “Bye Bye Bye”. We’re all puppets just waiting to become real boys and girls (while momentarily becoming puppets at our jobs in ordering to earn a living for ourselves). You just have to figure out what kind of Hustle works best for you.
NO STRINGS ATTACHED!