I know I said it was the ferns that made me get cold feet about the job, and not the commute, early mornings or lack of interest. But that’s not really true. I think I may still have been coaxed into taking a full time position at the hedge fund if I hadn’t gone to Missouri.
A very old friend, and a very good friend (the best and rarest type of friend) got married that fall, and it was very important that I went. My acceptance of the temp assignment was, in fact, contingent on my ability to skip work for a couple days towards the end of my two-week temporary assignment. So, with maybe eight of my required ten days of the job under my belt, I left Los Angeles for the first time since I have arrived and flew to St. Louis.
Missouri was cold, not at all to be confused with cool. It was a midwestern fall, grey and plain, but it was lovely. I visited the Anheuser-Busch Brewery on a rainy day and spent the free evenings watching football in the TGI Fridays adjacent to the hotel with people that I have known for more than half my life. As a military brat, such friends are luxuries beyond price, and to be frank I have no idea what I have done to deserve them.
I was so broke that I had no way of paying for my own hotel room, and the bride is such a kick-ass gal that she let me stay with her. Until the night of the wedding itself, when I crashed with some other friends. Obviously. I hadn’t even been able to send a gift, and I promised to if and when I got a job at this finance company. In any case, my friend was aware of my lack of funds, and at one point during the weekend crossed her fingers for me while I checked my balance at an ATM. I had enough to withdraw, luckily. I guess those hours of lunchless overtime paid out after all.
While we stood at the ATM, I confessed to being embarrassed that, at my age, I didn’t have my shit together. I promised my friend that I wasn’t really the hapless flake I appeared to be, and confessed that I was so in awe of her stability and happiness. I shouldn’t have been so worried about looking like a wreck, though. She was an old friend, after all. And she told me that she was proud of me. She told me that she knew I was going after my dreams.
But this didn’t allay my fears. Instead, I felt more ashamed. Even guilty. Because I wasn’t, not really. I felt like I had already given up, been used up. I felt like I had spent all my luck, as well as my money, on those stupid internships. I wanted to tell my friend that my dreams were a mistake, that she shouldn’t be proud of me for wasting my time. But I held my tongue. And by the time I got back to balmy Los Angeles, I had made up my mind.
I had moved far away from any family, halted a steady career just as it was getting started, left all my friends, and put up with hours and hours of brutal workshop at the hands of professionally disappointed professors. And for what? So that after four months in Los Angeles I could sign up for a job that made me miserable tired, hungry, and cold?
If my oldest friends believed that I was skipping out on their wedding presents and bunking in their hotel rooms because I was following my dreams, then damn it, that had better be what I was doing.
By the time I made it back to Los Angeles, I had made up my mind to stop hedging. I decided that if I was going to take a job that would make me unhappy, it should at least be related to entertainment. Even if it was in the mailroom at some agency.
My second day back at work, which was my last day as a temp, I called the Recruiter from the coffee shop across the street.
