March On, Revision!

Let's celebrate the month of March with a mean little story I wrote while I was feeling down about being an unemployed 20something with writer aspirations.

Daisy Buchanan Can Eat a Dick

In my younger, more vulnerable years, my high school English teacher gave me some advice when I was thinking really seriously about going to college to study management. Mrs. Baker told me to follow my heart because “college is not a trade school.” I let my academic elitism get the better of me and, when my more pragmatic relatives who were living comfortably in what seemed like boring existences asked why I was studying English, I would declare “trade school is for a recession!”

Then I graduated in a recession and the books I had read gave me little solace as I drifted from commission job to telephone sales to temp work and back. Kids who had learned trades were employed, married, had children and lives while I crisscrossed the country, building up more debt than life experience in forgettable, meaningless jobs with pay as miniscule as the impact I made on the world.

The morning I lay, staring at the ceiling, wondering what kept me beating on, a boat against the current, borne ceaselessly back into mediocrity and failed expectations, I remembered the punch line to all of it: That teacher, Mrs. Baker, took her own life two years after I left for college because the cancer spread and, while fulfilling, her job as a teacher did not provide her with the means to effectively combat the sickness. I call that one a draw.