To Look for America

Ladies and gents, I have some big news. Life has mostly been insane. I’ve done things like getting so drunk on a Monday that I don’t know how I got home; flying to Michigan to go stag to a wedding and do an interpretive dance to Duck Sauce’s “Barbra Streisand”; renting a car to drive all the way to Connecticut and back to see Spring Awakening for the fifth time; flying to Michigan then driving up to Traverse City with a wicked sinus infection and going to seven wineries with the bachelorette anyway; and generally trying to eat and sleep. I’m sorry I’ve been neglecting this blog so.

But big things are happening. On July 11, I’m packing up all my books and moving back to Michigan for a month. And after that, I’m renting a van for my boxes and moving all the way out to San Francisco. After a series of unfortunate events which meant that my boyfriend tried hard and wasn’t able to move out to Boston, he has ended up in San Francisco. Say what you want about being an independent woman and all that (and people seem to have no trouble doing so), a year and a half of living apart is long enough. I’m closing the 3,124 miles between us.

I gave my notice at work last week. Have you ever gotten a chance to do that? If you haven’t, you should try it. It’s one of the most fucking liberating things I’ve ever done. My job had become so much of a stressor that I started dreading Sundays because they were the day before Monday. I dreamed that my boss screamed at me on a stage (she has never and would never scream at me, but I was that afraid of screwing up). I dreamed I was drowning.

I was so nervous to quit. Once I started apartment-hunting, I knew I’d have to tell my work soon. But my boss kept being out of the office and the pressure built while I waited for the right time. It was almost cool, because I was living a secret-agent double life. I contemplated ninja suits. At work, I planned for things I knew I wouldn’t be around for. At home, I job-hunted and scouted apartments. But it wore on me. I felt like a high-school boyfriend who wants to break up with his girlfriend, but doesn’t want to dump her right before the homecoming dance. So he fakes it. So I faked it.

So I broke up with my job. I talked in break-up clichés, like “It’s not you, it’s me” and “This just isn’t the right fit for me right now” and “I really need to focus on my career” and “I’m looking for something nonprofit.” To her eternal credit, my boss did not scream at me. She did not tell me it was a terrible time to quit, like I worried she would. She said the best thing she could have said: “When I was young, I had a chance to go to California and I didn’t. I always wonder what my life would have been like if I had.”

As it turns out, despite the fact that I can dress like a hot corporate bitch and that I look great in heels and can carry a large purse and a gym bag and an iced coffee while I navigate the subway, I’m not really that person. I don’t fit in at such a large company. (Unless of course you want to hire me for a higher-up position in which I do little to no work and make boatloads of cash, in which case YES I AM AVAILABLE.) I don’t want to be checking my work email at midnight, especially if it’s to babysit grown-ass adults and tell them to do the work they were paid for. I do not want my entire philosophy to focus on my big fat bonus check instead of doing quality work.

They asked me what I was going to do next. I struggled to give an honest answer, because honestly, I haven’t a clue. Post-college life is like the Santa Claus of adulthood. No one tells you the truth when you graduate from college. You get to wear that hideous graduation cap and the world is your effing shiny oyster and you’ll find that pearl of a job and life will be perfect! But I’ve been graduated for two years and I still have no idea what I’m doing. None of my friends know what they’re doing. No one tells you that you will get to your twenties and have to make enormous life decisions that you feel woefully unprepared for. And that no one will help you make them but they will still change your life for the better or worse—but there’s no way you can know which. According to movies and books, there’s college and everything is great and then you’re in your thirties and everything is great again (unless you get a huge inheritance or can make tons of cash acting like an asshole on reality TV, in which case your twenties are golden). What’s in between? No one will tell you. Isaac Fitzgerald, managing editor of The Rumpus, tweeted his advice for some graduating Stanford students: “Well, your early twenties are going to suck.” Thanks, Isaac, for saying what no one else will.

This is not to say that I’ve become a huge cynic or that I’m going to stop shaving and start smoking weed and ramble about LIFE and CORPORATE AMERICA. I still cry every time I watch the last episode of Friends. I still think that most people are inherently good. But I really have no idea what I’m doing. I loved Michigan. I’ve loved Boston. But here is my thinking: Why not? Why not move across the country again? I can say I have lived by both oceans. Why not Jack Keroac the shit out of America? Why not live with the man I’m in love with?

My blog is going to stay the same. It will still be Jill Goes to the City. It will just be a different city. Hopefully there will be cupcakes in California. San Franciscans, tell me what to eat and where to go. And maybe consider being my friend.

Love, Jill

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