Why yes, I am a writer

I was interviewing for a job I didn’t want—some position at a grocery store that I didn’t actually apply for. I don’t even really know what the position was and I never did hear anything back about it even though they said they would call in a few days one way or another. I wanted out of the grocery industry for sure, but at the time I desperately needed a job, so I couldn’t really say no to the interview. It was conducted in a very small, very cold office where I sat in an old, rusty metal fold-out chair shivering despite wearing a long-sleeve dress shirt and tie in the middle of August.

Whether it’s 100% relevant to the job or not, I always include somewhere on my resume that I edit and self-publish a literary magazine and that I am a writer. I often get questions about it during the interview—generally in regards to what kind of time commitment it is. You know, in case it would take attention away from my “real” job if hired. At this particular interview, the question was asked, “So, you want to be a writer?”

“So you want to be a writer?”

Like, what kind of question is that? I wondered to myself. Don’t you see on this resume right in front of you that I am in fact a writer? Does it not say that I am a published writer? Does it not say that I write poems and stories and novels and blogs? Why are you asking if I want to be a writer?

I didn’t know how to answer her question without sounding like a dick so I just said, “Yeah, I guess so.”

I wondered if she had ever read a book. Then I wondered if that was a little judgmental to think. But I didn’t care much. I figured she had probably read 50 Shades of Grade or Twilight. Maybe a Nora Roberts book or two.

I don’t want to be a writer; I am a writer. Like, goddamn woman. If you want to be a writer, you pick up a pen and paper and you write. Or you grab a laptop. I’ve done that. I’ve written. I’ve written a lot. I am a writer. I wrote this right here that you’re reading. I sometimes even introduce myself to people as a writer.

Here’s the thing. I’m a writer right now, but what I want to be is a successful writer. I want to write and get paid to do it. I want to publish a bestseller and not have to work a real job ever again. There are no applications or job fairs for that. That requires real work and effort. It is email after email after email to agents and publishers. It is countless rejection letters. It is not taking it to heart. It is perseverance. It is writing and writing and writing and writing and writing and writing and writing and never stopping. I know what I want and I will achieve it.

On an island in the sun

If I have ever learned anything from Hugh Grant it is that I am not an island. In the 2002 adaptation of Nick Hornby’s About A Boy, Grant, portraying boytoy Will Freeman, famously uttered, “All men are islands,” and then proceeded to explain how this is the foundation of his life—of his bachelorhood. He believed that with all of the conveniences of today’s society that you don’t need anyone or anything else beyond what you could obtain for yourself—and his character was filthy rich without needing to work so he had everything. Like an island, Will was isolated. He had no desire to settle down—didn’t care if he had a family and only had a small handful of friends. If it wasn’t on his island, then he didn’t need it.

I am not an island and deep down, no one is.

I don’t like to do things by myself. No matter how badly I want to see a film, I won’t go by myself. I hate even just eating by myself. And aside from when I lived in a shoebox dorm room, I don’t like being home by myself for extended periods of time. I need people in order to function. That is why I struggled a lot in college—I had friends, but mostly kept to myself in my dorm room writing yet another history or English paper or reading yet another dull academic writing. When I wasn’t doing that, I was writing for myself or working (side note: I somehow managed to finish writing a novel I had started a couple years earlier while simultaneously working on a massive semester-long research paper). There is a very small handful of people I met during my time at college who I still keep in touch with and as much I would often times like to blame someone else, there is no one to blame but myself.

When I graduated high school, none of my friends really left. The only one who really moved on had spent the last two years living in Japan where her dad was working, so it wasn’t much of an adjustment to not having her around or being able to talk to her often. This was when cell phones were just starting to become commonplace too and when unlimited text messaging was a status symbol, so it really wasn’t unusual to us to not see one another for a few weeks or even talk to each other for that matter. Without cell phones, the cost of long-distance phone calls was still a concern—something today’s generation will never understand no matter how many times you try to explain it.

My two best friends are both younger than me. One just graduated high school this year and the other will be graduating next spring. The first one went to school over an hour away and when he left, it was very strange for me because that was the first time I really had to deal with that. I wasn’t sure how to handle it. I know I did better than his little sister though who was already crying even a week before he left. I imagine she wrapped herself around his leg when it came time to leave.

The other, who was once introduced by a mutual friend of ours as my “bestest friend ever”, is 7 years, 3 months, and 4 days my junior. I’ve known him for several years now and have watched him grow up. We’re not just best friends, but also brothers. Last week he enlisted in the Marines.

I was heartbroken.

After 4 long, stressful months of unemployment and somehow not once having shed a tear, this was what finally did me in.

He made the decision without talking to me and told me in a less-than-tactful way. He said he was afraid to tell me, that he didn’t want me to try to talk him out of it. And I understood why. It wasn’t the first time he had said he was afraid to tell me something. But it still hurt.

For a long time he had always said that he was going to eventually leave Ohio, that he did not want to spend the rest of his life in the rural area he had called home for most of his life. I always hoped that day wouldn’t come, not wanting to lose my best friend. That maybe he would just end up at OSU or Wright State and maybe do a semester abroad. I definitely didn’t want him to move to Florida where he spent his childhood like he had said many times he wanted to. My real brother lives all the way in Seattle, so I was counting on my best friend being around to be the cool uncle to my kids when I eventually have some and to give me nieces and nephews that I didn’t have to get on a plane to see. I remember once we joked that we would force our kids to get married so we could finally be real family.

Now there is a date. There is a finite amount of time left until the day he is officially a Marine and is no longer up the street and around the corner. August 11, 2015—just 15 days before his 19^th birthday. I have a countdown on my phone for his 21^st birthday, but I’m not sure I can bring myself to set one up for that day. I’m not sure I want to know how many days are left.

My best friend has always lived within walking distance—even just across the driveway at one point. It’s not uncommon for him to just randomly show up at my back door, even at 11:30 at night when he has school the next morning. We have always done everything together—movies, bowling, concerts, baseball games, poetry readings, fundraisers, urban exploration through parts of Columbus where you had better have your car doors locked. I’ve taught him how to bowl, how to write, how to save money, introduced him to music he otherwise would have never heard. He taught me how to love baseball, how to dress nice and properly match my shoes to my outfit, and gave me the encouragement and confidence I hadn’t really felt from anyone else before to actually take my writing seriously and share it with a wider audience. We have made each other a better person.

The idea that all of that might be gone terrifies me.

He has said for a long time that wasn’t going to stay in Ohio, that he wanted to get out of this small town. I let myself believe that wasn’t ever going to happen, especially when he started talking about going to college in Ohio—OSU, Wright State, Kent State. I can’t let myself believe that anymore now because there is a contract on file with the United States Marine Corps that says otherwise. I have to allow myself to let go and to him grow into adulthood and become his own person. For a minimum of four years he will be in another state or even in another country; I think we’re both hoping for South Carolina. And for the first twelve weeks of that, we will have next-to-no communication beyond a pen and paper. 

I’m a very sociable person. I like to talk to my best friends daily, even if it’s just a single text. I know that many times I rely on my friends too much—something I’ve grown to learn over the years. A lot of it stems from some mild neurosis from having been betrayed friends in the past, but I’m learning how to trust again and that the friends I have do genuinely care about me and will be there when I need them. I’ve been around for a quarter of a century now, which doesn’t make me old by any means, but in that times I’ve seen a lot of friends come and go. I’m still friends with a lot of people I met in elementary school, kindergarten even. And I actually talk to them regularly and hang out with them, so it’s not like it’s just a friendship by name. But I’ve had people who have called me their best friend and I’ve called them my best friend who are no longer a part of my life or are barely a part of my life anymore—some for good reasons, some for simply just a matter of growing apart. I guess that is what scares me. 

There is nothing scarier than to feel like you’re not in control of a situation, but it is during that time when we will learn the most about ourselves.

About A Boy is one of my favorite books and movies. It follows a bachelor who thinks he has his entire life figured out until a young boy forces himself and his mother into it. By the end, Will Freeman discovers that he was missing a family the entire time, that he wasn’t as happy as he thought he was all on his own. In the beginning he was an island, but he learns that no one is an island, but rather part of a chain of islands. The thing is, though, the Earth’s surface is always shifting—some islands move closer together while others drift further apart. As the neighboring islands drift, it’s all about what you do to keep in each other’s sights.

The time I sold furniture for a week

I worked in furniture sales for one week. It was a locally owned and operated furniture store that had bought into a large corporate franchise scheme. The fact that they had more or less sold out should have been my first sign of what was to come.

I have no interest in couches other than sitting on them. I definitely have no interest in selling them.  But it was a job with benefits and good pay and it had been three months since I was last employed and I had bills to pay. So I took it. I didn’t want to take it, but I knew I needed to. I knew someone who had been working there for many years too, so I figured it couldn’t be that bad of a job (read: by knew, I mean someone I casually knew in high school).

My schedule for training was Thursday through Monday. Certainly not ideal, but I understood and respected that that was when I had to work because that was when the sales manager was scheduled and she was the one training me. I was told in the interview that training would be about three weeks. On day one, I was told five to six weeks. By the end of day three, I had figured out that the sales associates worked open to close with one one-hour lunch break, which meant my schedule totaled around 44 hours a week and was, in fact, the shortest possible schedule you could have. The store opens at 10am and closes at 8pm during the week, though employees are expected to be there by 8:45am. Hardly the “some evenings and weekends” that was promised by the classifieds ad, the phone interview, and the in-person interview and definitely not the implied rotating morning/evening shifts. And since this was a salaried/commissioned position, there was no overtime. Once I realized how many hours I would be working and did some quick math, the training salary I was given no longer looked as exciting (think fast food pay). I wasn’t sure how to feel, though my heart was saying deceit. It felt like they purposely overlooked an important detail so they could fill a gap with a warm body because they knew it was far from being an ideal job. How exactly are you supposed to have a life when you have no weekends and literally your entire day is consumed with peddling bedroom sets and dinettes? There are far too many people in my life who I know need me to be available for them for more than a couple hours a day for me to be locked up on a retail floor for over eleven hours a day. That alone was enough to make me want to get out as soon as possible.

As my training continued, I wasn’t sure if I could continue no matter how much I needed a job.

The entire training program is based on a book published in 1986 that has accrued a whopping eighteen reviews on Amazon, the first dating back to 1997. The book is accompanied by twelve training videos that had been converted from VHS to DVD (they actually ended with the narrator reminding you to rewind the tape). Knowing these videos were as old as I am and featured a host who probably saw the Great Depression, I knew to expect some subtle sexism given the subject at hand—you know, the recliner is the man’s domain and his wife makes him a sandwich while he watches TV. That’s exactly what I saw. And the sexist sentiment was echoed by the female sales manager who oversaw an all-female sales staff, though in a slightly different light. I was told that since I was a man, I would probably run into issues with connecting with clients because it would be weird for me to compliment a woman on her purse, earrings, or hair (because apparently only women shop for furniture and the only way to connect with a customer is compliment them because we’re all vain, superficial beings or something—but maybe I’m reading too much into it) and also with describing furniture because men do not understand the aesthetics of furniture and care more about its construction and reliability—though, my skills as a writer, of which she knew little, would supposedly offset this biological setback. Not one bit of that rubbed me the right way.

And then the videos took a racist turn and I had to pick my jaw up off the floor.

I can’t for the life of me remember what comparison he was making, but the man in the videos went on this awful tangent about how if you give an American a pair of chopsticks, they won’t know how to use them. Okay, yeah, chopsticks are kinda difficult to use. And then for whatever he felt he needed to continue his example by referring to “Oriental people” not being to use a fork. And kept saying it. That was offensive when those videos were filmed let alone today. I wanted to take my shoe off and throw it at the TV. I needed this job though. And so started the conflict.

I felt like I had been deceived about the job and then you add in the sexism and then the racism and then consider the fact that this business is killing way too many trees because of a WAY outdated infrastructure. And I just didn’t know if I could continue no matter how much I needed a job.

The last straw came when I was told to lie and make stuff up.

The sales manager said to me, “I know you don’t have a girlfriend but go ahead and say to a customer, ‘My girlfriend has that purse and she loves!’” Another sales associate piped in saying she couldn’t lie because she knew that customer would come back and she would get caught in her. She did, however, offer up that she would often tell customers that she knew someone who had a particular piece of furniture because odds are she had previously sold it to someone. The sales manager agreed and upped the ante by saying she would tell customers she even owned something when she didn’t own it at all. My stomach was turning. And that wasn’t the first time that had happened. Even just the morning meetings would do it. On what would end up being my last day there, I got to see them use their tactics first hand on my friend’s mom and I couldn’t have been more disgusted when the sales manager said to the sales associate after she had left, “See, you still got it!”

My two days off came and I had some hard thinking to do. Could I continue working there? I honestly didn’t know. I needed the money and I knew that already having a job would more easily help me find new employment, but my stomach was already turning and I didn’t want to deal with ulcers anytime soon. I was afraid I would have more trouble sleeping at night than I already had.

I spent a lot of time weighing things out and asking people for advice. If I quit, would it truly be because I couldn’t tolerate the environment or would it be because I just didn’t want to do the work and didn’t like what I was doing? I went to a prestigious institution and received a real degree in a real subject so I shouldn’t be selling furniture, right? If I quit, I didn’t want that to be the reason. I had to know that I was quitting for moral reasons. By Thursday morning, I had figured that out and I’m still surprised I was paid the right amount and on time.

The sales manager tried to pass it off as joking when I said I didn’t like being told to lie to customers, but there was nothing humorous about it. She apologized for me interpreting it that way. I didn’t really accept her apology. I then told her their training videos were racist and her attitude changed. As she walked away from me, she told me not to take anything on me way out. I don’t think I had ever been disrespected that much before in my life. I should have dragged a couch out behind me just to spite her.

This was a little more than two weeks ago. I still haven’t found anything else. But I know that my head will rest easier on my pillow at night now. There’s an elderly lady I help with groceries and I get her mail for her on occasion and she kept telling me how proud she was for sticking with my morals and that pushed all doubt from my mind. Although my bank account is still dwindling, albeit with a small amount of padding from my five days in furniture sales, I know that I did the right thing and that I am a better person for it no matter how well I would have done the job.