For the first time in my life, I find myself in possession of a decent amount of money.
It's nothing crazy, in six months of being a working professional, I've still not amassed what my roommates did over the course of their summer internships while still in school. It's more than I'm used to though.
In the months between when I graduated and when I started working, I thought a lot about money. I thought about how I didn't have any, and I thought about how much my parents had spent on me over the course of the past 22 years.
Beyond that, I thought about my grandparents. I thought about how they grew up dirt-poor on a farm and how my grandfather worked his way up at the gas company to provide for his family. I thought about how my dad went to school to be an engineer because he knew he could earn a living, regardless of whether or not he loved building bridges and pipelines.
I'm a man particularly bound to familial piety. I rarely make any decision that I know would actively displease or, more accurately, dishonor my parents.
I thought earning money would give me a sense of moral rightness. That it would satisfy me in its own sake. Weber writes about that moral compunction to be a good steward being the basis of capitalism. With the specter of Calvin lingering over the reformation era, good believers had no real assurance of their election except the favor of God upon them in their everyday lives. Weber posited that the accumulation of capital was one way that these pious folks proved their heavenly bonafides. Being good Christians, they didn't use their newfound money for licentious or craven purposes. They just put it back into their industry, building capital over and over. Weber thought that the accumulation of wealth without exercising the attendant pleasures that it could bring was a form of worldly asceticism. Rather than beating his breast in the desert, the modern hermit sheltered himself in his factory - a constantly evolving altar to a God whose love was remote and unknowable with any real certainty.
Not being a Calvinist and instead choosing to take God's love as a given (perhaps too carelessly), this accumulation of capital hasn't done much to assuage the persistent dissatisfaction that his hung over my life since I graduated from college. I get a little thrill when I see the graph of my personal finance app raise higher and higher, but it's fleeting. When I look at it, I mostly just ask myself what I intend to do with that money. Why am I earning it, other than out of my aforementioned sense of familial devotion?
It's no secret that my real ambition is to be a writer, but, by all evidence, it doesn't appear to be a very pressing ambition. In fact, I've pretty much actively sabotaged any opportunities at writing that the universe has put in my way.
As a sophomore, I was one of two students in my journalism class to be recommended for an internship at the Statesman. Having developed a loathing of journalism (partly the result of my overly stringent and, frankly, not terrible pleasant TA), I put off applying until the last minute, when I was informed that the position had already been filled. That decision proved particularly biting each of the four separate times that I applied for jobs with said publication - jobs that I was more than qualified for.
Of course, journalism has only ever been a stepping stone for TV writing. A way to amass stories and find my voice before I became the next David Simon.
My closest brush with the entertainment industry ("the industry" they call it Tinseltown [Hollywood, CA {California}]) came the summer before my senior year. I applied to the summer program on a whim after the conclusion of a meeting for a website of specious quality that I was writing for at the time. As I typed, sweating in an overheated meeting room in the PCL, my heart pounded and my brain flooded with the addicting chemicals that correspond to possibility. In my essay I said that it had been my ambition to be a TV writer since I was thirteen years old and first read Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (a book my brother, by happenstance, just bought me for Christmas. Here's hoping that's portentous). I wrote about how the summer program would be my first foray into certain...if not stardom, then at least productivity and fulfillment.
Instead, I panicked when none of the internships in development got back to me, so I worked for a magazine and toiled in the content management mines for eight hours a day. It was an educational experience, but not the one I had imagined all breathless and sweaty that day in the PCL.
Twice I've been offered jobs at the radio station where I once interned and loved to work, but both times the timing has been off.
The only writing job I've turned down that I'm happy I withdrew from was in Lubbock. I think it's probably better for my character to be discontent and making money rather than content (in the same way that the denizens of an opium den are content) and making no money.
Luckily, I've now realized what I can do with my newfound largesse.
This whole time, I've felt beholden to this narrative I've concocted about my family's finances and I don't even know if it's true.
(To be honest, I don't really know anything about my family. We rarely talk about ourselves to one another, and even more rarely do we talk about our history. In a movie this would be the sign of a nefarious past, but in this case, I think it's merely a sign of generations of Catholic steadfastness.)
I think all of my internal (and unshared) lamentations and mental anguish may have been mirages. Never once has my father ever actually told me that he expects me to enslave myself to a salary. If anything, his actions have shown the opposite. He's been, honestly, too generous. Beyond that, I think he really wants me to pursue my dreams and to be happy.
A few days after I applied to film school, he sent me an email to a youtube video and said, "You should appreciate this, as a filmmaker."
Now, even I wouldn't have the gall to call myself a filmmaker, but that's kind of how he is. When I was writing all the time, he called me a writer. From what I've gleaned from our conversations, my dad may view me as a writer even more so than I do myself.
So I don't know exactly what I'm going to do yet, but now (thanks to the sacrifice of untold Gregorys before) I have a little money, and I'm going to try to do something meaningful with it.
I don't know when, or how, just yet - but I'm going to try. I'm not going to look back a year or five or ten from now and wonder why I wasted my youth. I'm going to try.
No comments:
Post a Comment