I thought I’d be free to do as I pleased coming to grad school in Boston—I’d get a job as a waitress in the North End and speak Italian with the regulars. I was going to live in a great apartment with just one roommate (who was a fellow Midwesterner) and I was going to write, write, write. I came to study Creative Writing and write The Memoir that I had planned to write for years but never even knew where to begin. Well, it turned out—I didn’t even know where or how to begin living here—much less writing here.
Yes, I ended up working as a waitress, but quit after the low season hit and I was making on average $8 a day. Yes, I lived with that roommate of mine from the Midwest, but quickly found our ideas of cleaniliness and order to be sourly mismatched. And the writing? Well, I was writing—whenever I managed to clear off my cluttered desk and find a moment when I wasn’t exhausted from work or a hangover to get the crazed jumble of words out and onto a page.
Well, let’s just say—things changed once I got a job with regularly scheduled hours. Yeah, you come to grad school with one goal in mind (for the most part): do well. Because if you do well, you somehow might manage to not waste the money and time you spent getting a master’s degree in the first place. If you do well, you might leave here proud of yourself and not knee deep in regret and failure.
I was headed down the latter route once I started working retail and never knowing what my week was going to be. After getting my new “regular job” (though a café worker at an all women’s gym is hardly “regular”) I started being able to actually plan my day. Plan my writing schedule. Plan my life. And now I find myself strolling into my apartment around the same time everyday and finding that my mind starts churning out coherent thoughts that actually make me think that maybe, just maybe—I’ll finally get this memoir finished.
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