How Did We Get Here?

You may be wondering, as people are wont to do (or maybe not, if you know nothing about me anyway), how it is, exactly, that such a bright,* ambitious** young woman with a well-paying job in Chicago decided to drop it completely, pack up, leave family and friends behind, and relocate to Orange County, California for a job that pays less than minimum wage.

Well, here's how it began:

Sometime last May, I graduated from college with a highly-optimistic view of the world and my future prospects as a writer in the newspaper and/or magazine industry. By June, I became desperate to find work that paid money and took up an internship at a PR firm in the suburbs of Chicago.

What I did not realize was that:

1. Commuting to the suburbs from the city is just about the worst experience ever. Doing it twice a day, five days a week, is torture. But I did read a lot of books. And I acquired great bladder control, since there's nothing like commuting 2 hours without access to a bathroom.
2. Finding work within a month of graduating is actually quite good. Particularly if you've graduated from a liberal arts college only months before the economy tanks, and the newspaper industry had been going downhill for a long time prior. So there's that. Even though I still think maybe if I'd held out for another month or two, I could've found something better, but then again, it's not I had the money to pay rent if I'd been unemployed for another month. But, I could have probably worked fast food again, just to pay rent, and then found a better job.
3. There are many ways to do PR. Some ways are right, and useful, and excellent at getting the public to understand an issue or solution. The other way was how we did business, which is basically like putting a monkey in front of a computer and telling him to spam 2,000 journalists within an 8-hour day (minus 1 hour for lunch). Some people find this task daunting, but if you know how to use the Mail Merge function on Microsoft Word, it's a cinch. More on this later.

After this three-month internship ended, I was on the verge of moving on to bigger and better things. I felt it. I was looking for jobs. And then, on the same day I was scheduled to have an interview elsewhere, my boss offered me $35K to stay on board and continue to spam editors with e-mails. Looking back, it's hard to tell if this was a good decision or a bad one, as a month later, in October, the stock market took a dive and people started getting laid off all over the place. Since my student loans went into repayment that December, I was fortunate to have a job at all.

But as time went on, the general feeling of corporate slavery wore into my bones and I came home every night feeling like, perhaps, this isn't the way I wanted to live my life. I felt as though I were banging my head against a wall until my personality seeped out of my skull and fell on my office chair in a suicidal and, maybe, self-preserving fit.

Then 2009 came around, and I was still miserable, and I knew that something had to be done. But what? And how, when we're in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, would that be possible?

To be continued in Part Two.

*Since this is a blog, it ought to be rife with flattery. I know this because everything I've read about Gen Y indicates that we are complete navel-gazing narcissists, so I will try to include as much of that nonsense as possible to fulfill that stereotype. Wouldn't want the boomers or Xers to think we are anything like them, except with obviously better technology.

**This is true and not an exaggeration.