Notes for twenty-somethings

In keeping with the previous post, here is my list of coulda-shoulda-woulda's, aka youth is wasted on the young:

1. That guy who you hooked up with that you dug who then acted like a psycho? Forget him. He'll still be a psycho -- and not as cute -- in 20 years.
2. Take pictures of your boobs -- just for yourself, not for sexting, people! -- before you get pregnant or breastfeed. While it would be impolitic to say they'll never be as good again, they'll definitely never be the same again. Plus, maybe by the time you're 40, boob jobs recreate what you were rather than...Barbie.
3. Travel and/or live overseas as soon as you possibly can, for as long as you possibly can.
4. Get up close and personal with poverty that is far worse than your own at least once by the time you're 25.
5. The gym is your friend. Really. It's boring and horrid but once stuff sags, it sags for good.
6. Use sunscreen. Lots and lots of it. Every day. Even if you work in a cave. When you're 40, nothing will be as gratifying as people thinking you're a lot younger.
7. Avoid credit card debt like the fucking plague. Even if her smile gives you the willies, read and follow Suze Orman.
8. Keep a list of everyone you've ever kissed. And keep that list hidden.
9. Tidy your purse once a week. Then aspire to make the rest of your life like your purse.
10. Let me think on this some more....

A letter to the Frenemy to read today

My dear Frenemy,

Did you know that I'm probably twice your age, have never met you, and have a girl crush on you? For you, I coin the term, "grush" (girl crush) -- which sounds like something vaginal and unpleasant, but under the circumstances, perhaps that is appropriate.  I hope you don't find this creepy (even if I do).

So. Here we are. Do you watch TV? I thought of you this weekend when I was on the Stairmaster and I saw a commercial for a feminine wash, the gist of which was, "Someone told me I stank down there, which let me tell you, is really learning a lesson the hard way." I thought, damn, I'm sure I can't find that ad online and comment accordingly, but I bet the Frenemy can. And then I thought some more, my thighs surely growing ever more taut with every step, how if I were 20 years younger and lived in Brooklyn or wherever the hell you live, surely we'd be friends, and then reminded myself that oh, no, we wouldn't be because I'd be so upset that you were so much better at being me than I was. You are the best me EVER. You are the me that never was.

Can I tell you how unhappy I am that blogging didn't exist when I was twenty-something? Think about that. I was perhaps my most ripe for blogging in 1992, when the Internet (and you) barely existed. But I digress.

Sometimes I think about what I would tell you: For the Frenemy: Lessons I Have Learned. Some are deadly important: (Don't dismiss finding a rich guy; and for that you must keep a tidy purse); some are less so, such as: be prepared, if it hasn't started already, for the urban garden of wiry hairs that will arrive out of nowhere on your upper lip and chin -- they'll be like weeds on the sidewalk. You'll wonder if your friends notice that you have a habit of running your forefinger over the right corner of your upper lip, and you'll hope that they think you're just being thoughtful, but really, you're thinking, Jesus, get me to a bathroom so I can get the tweezers and I really fucking hope I can pull this one out at the root and if I really had it together and were the type who kept a tidy purse I'd also be the type who would get those spiky strays lasered.

But now I have to go because I have to go pick up my son, who is two and I am trying to teach not to pick his nose, much as that is sort of hypocritical of me because more than once I've caught myself picking my nose when I write. Like my subconscious thinks that boogers harbor great ideas.

More soon, I promise.

P.S. Call your mother.

On the broken heart of Henry VIII

The Brokenhearted King?

Watching the last season of the Tudors was like eating cold oatmeal with a side of collard greens, but it did make me revisit my thoughts about Henry VIII, about whom I'm read an embarrassingly large amount. Sure, he was vain, arrogant, cruel, gullible, mercurial, dastardly, possibly brain damaged, and later in his life, fat, stinky, in chronic pain, and likely impotent, but you have to remember: he must also have been simply brokenhearted by the flock of disappointments that descended on his not-at-all-private life.

Sure, we all know the stories of the six wives, but when you really stop to think about the stack of losses, betrayals, and assumed betrayals were, it's awful to think about the impact on his interior life.

Historians think that Catherine of Aragon, good wife that she was, had a total of six to nine pregnancies, only one of which resulted in a healthy child (a girl, later Queen Mary) -- the rest were either stillbirths or miscarriages, and one son, also named Henry, who lived 52 days. Can you imagine? The thought of those disappointments alone chill me.

Then we move on to Anne Boleyn, clearly the great passionate love of his life -- she successfully produced an heir (albeit also girl, Elizabeth), and thereafter had, many historians believe, multiple miscarriages. Stress could have been at play, or just the vagaries of pregnancy in all eras before the 20th century, but one theory I find intriguing is that Anne might have been Rhesus negative (Rh-). If Henry was Rh+, then after her first pregnancy (Elizabeth), her body would reject any Rh+ babies thereafter. Now, of course, your OB will run tests and give you an antibody shot if there is potential Rh problem, but then, there would be no explanation aside from God hates you. And not just a little: at this point, Henry was up to, oh, maybe 8-15 failed pregnancies and two wives who "failed" at the one thing that was required of them.

Let's move on to Jane Seymour -- probably the best long term "fit" for Henry -- they probably could have been happily married for years. She produced a son (Edward) about a year and a half after they married, but then she pegged out immediately, probably from puerperal fever (which killed his mother as well). Yet another terrible loss, and the only explanation, yet again, would have been that God hates you, when really it was likely more that there were a lot of unsanitized hands messing around in the royal birth canal. So now on top of two failed marriages, and multiple miscarriages/stillbirths/early childhood deaths, Henry's wife has died just trying to produce a child.

At this point, the equation looks remarkably like Henry pays, quite literally, for children with the lives of his wives. And that God has it out for him particularly, above all others.

We'll skip Anne of Cleves -- much as that situation was a bummer, grief and heartbreak don't seem to have played a role, though from her perspective it must have sucked to think you're marrying the hot king of England and instead you wind up with a foul-tempered fatty who has the audacity to tell the world that YOU smell bad (and that your boobs sag).

Moving on: Catherine Howard, aka the ninny. By this time, Henry was 50, fat, grumpy, and stinky, and surely delighted to be bonking a hot 17-year-old. Still, no children (maybe because wives made him so nervous he couldn't get it up), and then, because she wasn't just young but also STUPID, she had a liaison with his favorite courtier (not to mention plenty of previous unqueenly dalliances that at best people of my mother's generation would call "heavy petting.") Can you imagine how he felt? You're the King of England, god dammit, you've had a shitty time at family life, and your hot young dumb wife has the audacity to CHEAT ON YOU? He was probably off his rocker with rage and heartbreak at that point; no wonder he said off with her head. (Not that I'm in favor of that. Or burning heretics. Or drawing and quartering. But you get my drift.)

Then we have Catherine Parr, to whom he was married for about three years, until he died at 56. No kids, presumably because he was impotent by that time since she did have one child later, at age 35 and with Thomas Seymour. She died 6 days later -- likely because of dirty hands in the birth canal, yet again.

Sure, at the time, many families lost many children, and women spent most of their fecund lives either pregnant or nursing. But Henry's situation -- the drama of it, the stakes, the mystery of it, the sheer relentlessness and bad luck -- deserves, I think, a small helping of a more sympathetic look. 

How many times must have his chest felt like it might collapse from crushing despair?

Depression, Depression!

So, when I'm a bit depressed (like now), I tend to mutter the "Tradition" song from Fiddler on the Roof under my breath, replacing the refrain of "Tradition!" with "Depression!" As in, "Depression! Depression! [insert 15 na-nas] accompanied by mournful, slightly violent violin.



Try it. Especially if the drudgery of family life is part of your problem.

Maybe I was wrong, Jen

What am I going to do with you, Jen? I just don't know what to think. Maybe you're not the agent of heartbreak, or maybe your spin doctors are so fantastic you and Justin might as well be in a blender. A luv blender.  In which case, as I imagine it, your blonde locks topple out of the top of the blender as you go round round baby right round. Which is funny because didn't you promise Brad in your vows that you'd always make him banana milkshakes?

Don't ask me why I'm so obsessed with your love life, but let it be known that I've also been known to wonder what Brad and Angie actually talk about and what she's thrown at him, because you know she's thrown things at him, while I'm sure the only thing you ever threw at him were your black lace thong while he was doing an Adonis recline on your Dux bed with 600 kabillion thread count sheets.

BTW, nice touch on the black and white photos. Classy.

Glass houses, Aniston, glass houses

So, word is that Jennifer Aniston has taken her wrecking balls (eh hem) to the noble house of Bivens-Theroux (no, no reason to know it, but now you will). This delights me. Not because I've ever been solidly allied with either Team A or Team J, but because I think it heralds some badly needed growth and perspective on her part (at least on her public part). Dishing out heartbreak is part of the great equation -- a bit of time on the giving end rather than the receiving end can do wonders for the complexity and overall empathic capacity of a person.

Not that I've ever met any of the individuals involved (or watched many of their movies, for that matter), and not that I'm about to say anything earthshaking here, but I think if I really had to choose teams, I would have been on Team J -- she might well be a nutter (or not), but I suspect Aniston is sweet, super funny, and, in the end, because she's probably always sweet and funny, a bit boring. (I also faintly wonder about her intelligence. Of all things to shill, she chooses BOTTLED WATER? Called "Smart Water", no less?

Hon, I'm sure I'm not the first one to break it to you, but when you're up against a woman who rescues children from a life of flies in their eyes, doing your best to maximize further contributions to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch isn't really furthering your cause as a) smart; or b) anything but tasty suite of terrific boobs, gorgeous hair, and really lovey eyes. (BTW, have you ever noticed how Brad goes for not just the super famous ones, but also the super famous ones with the truly spectacular racks? Gwyneth...Jen...Angie...If he'd been willing to stoop lower (or older) to the likes of Teri Hatcher or Christina Applegate or Liz Hurley, imagine how different our world would be. (A guy friend had to point it out to me years ago that Applegate made her career on her knockers. And I won't say anything about her breast cancer because that would be construed as truly mean, and I like her. I mean, I think I would if I knew her.)

But back to the matter at hand: Aniston, homewrecker. I like to imagine the conversation she and Theroux had as they decided to "turn the corner," as it were.

Theroux: C'mon, baby, it's no big thang.
Aniston: But it is! Think of my brand! I'm sweet and clear as water!
Theroux: But everyone knows you need to shake it up a bit, sugar mouse. The world is bored by you.
Aniston:  Oh, you're right. Maybe I should give Heidi some tips. Remember when I burned all of the lingerie Brad ever gave me? That was good one.
Theroux: Or the time you fooled everyone into thinking you were getting over it by decorating your beach house with a million Buddhas, like you were Jen the Zen?
Aniston: Wait, all this time, Zen has been Buddhist? I thought it was, like, Hindu or something. That's what Liz Hurley told me.
Theroux: Just cuddle up here, honey, everything will be all right.
Aniston: Too bad I can't go on Oprah anymore.
Theroux: Yeah. I'm great at couch-jumping.
Aniston: Aw, I love you, you're so edgy!

Meanwhile, Heidi Bivens is speed-dialing Isabella Boyston.

Notes on journalism for a young girl

"So you want to be a journalist?"

I'm honest with the kids from my alma mater who contact me, mistakenly thinking I actually go to work somewhere everyday as journalist: I tell them that the alumni database isn't up to date (my own fault), I haven't worked steadily since I was laid off over two years ago, and that it is a tough field. I am circumspect.

But last week a note from a nice young woman arrived in my email box, asking all the usual questions, "What's your career path been? Should I go to journalism school?", and the circumspection shattered. I told her what I really think, what my life is really like, and how my friends who still cling to journalism as their bread and butter suffer for their art.

Below isn't exactly what I said to this young woman -- this version is far more spiked with vitriol and personal details -- but it's close.  

Sure, I'd be happy to tell you about my path (such as it's been). It might even be therapeutic.

I was an English major in college but drifted for a long time before I decided to go to grad school in journalism. Went to Berkeley's j-school, won awards there for my magazine work, then worked as a web producer in public broadcasting for several different shows, projects, etc. because god knows most of us mortals can't make a living writing magazine pieces. (Case in point: I worked for several years on one piece (albeit on and off, but still), and it was hugely successful when it was published and spawned a host of documentaries, including one by The National Geographic.  I was paid $500 for it, which barely covered my out-of-pocket costs for reporting it.)

In retrospect, in 2005 when I graduated, the writing was on the wall that journalism was a dying field, but for me between the market and just plain bad luck, it's been an extra rough run. Stupidly (in one of those moments that now causes me to lie awake at night), I passed up a great job opportunity when I was still in grad school because, I said, I really needed to finish my degree. (Little did I know that I would never have a better offer and that the degree means next to nothing.)

Still, I managed to keep it together with a string of good jobs until I was laid off  in 2009, when I had a four-month-old baby (n.b. that I was one of 30 employees laid off at my company then, 27 of whom were women). If we're talking salary, the "height of my career" was a year or so after grad school, when I made $80K, but that was for a start-up that rested on a terrific idea that never saw the light of day. Now, especially since I've been out of work for two years, I'm not even competitive for jobs that pay $40-50 K and expect 60 hour work weeks. I make ends meet by taking little jobs as they come: writing scripts for corporate videos, producing on-off projects, doing research, feeding my son a lot of rice and beans. Whenever I sent out a pitch, unless I have a particularly strong and personal relationship with an editor, I hear nothing back. Even when I follow up, and follow up, and follow up.

Once in awhile people I know get a gig that pays relatively well, say $70-80K, doing business reporting for, say, Bloomberg, but that's rare. And those jobs aren't jobs where you'll ever make significantly more – you’ll be lucky if you get cost-of-living increases and never get laid off. A friend of mine from grad school is a kick-ass producer for a media outlet I won’t name. The week her work won a prestigious national journalism award, she had $100 in her bank account. To this day, she struggles to pay her rent. Another friend is a stringer for a major national newspaper that I also won’t name; he’s a phenomenally talented writer and reporter, and he told me that he makes more money per minute driving car down the road and getting mileage reimbursement than he does on the few hundred dollars he gets per story. (Not only that, but his editors have been known to praise his pitches and then assign them to staff reporters –which is the journalistic equivalent of a swift kick in the nuts.) Another friend won a Pulitzer while in journalism school for an investigative story, and he got so disgusted with the field that he quit to go to nursing school. My husband also went to Berkeley's J-school, and he chucked journalism to become a private investigator (which believe me, is not as fun as it sounds). 

The good news is that I'm writing a book, as are several of my other friends from grad school, and we agree that at this point it feels easier to sell a book than it is to sell an article. Magazine and newspaper editors are often rude, dismissive, and unimaginative, whereas if you can find a good agent to represent you, as I have, it can be the start of a great partnership that in the end will be less stressful and even if the book doesn't do that well, more lucrative and less humiliating than begging editors at magazines and newspapers to pay attention to you. But then, when I was your age, I didn't yet have a book in me.

If I had it to do differently, I would have spent a few years in journalism in my early twenties (which would have been in the pre-dawn of the Internet) and then, if I still liked the field and felt like I could contribute to it in a meaningful way, I would have applied to j-school. Then, I would have time to either become very well-established in the field or chuck it and change courses. As it was, in journalism school I didn't focus enough on my technical skills -- I should have gotten completely fluent in FinalCut, ProTools, etc. I'm sure you've heard this before, but you have to be a one man band now: you have to write, shoot, edit (not just print, but video and audio), produce, Tweet, and wipe their editors' asses, which in my frank opinion is contortionism. Rare is the person who can do all of that and really be on their game.

So, my advice should you choose to go into this field is as follows:

- If you apply to journalism school make sure you get very clear figures on how many of the program's recent graduates are employed in journalism, and where. J-schools fudge those figures all the time, and you need to be very persistent to get an accurate picture of what is really happening with their alums. Even though the field has collapsed, Berkeley's program still accepts classes of 60 students, which I think is unconscionable. Why accept so many? Because the school still has to keep tenured faculty employed. How many of those students will ever get good jobs isn’t in the calculus.

- Forget wordsmithing and focus on technical skills. You might have those already since you're of a different generation than me, but still, be comfortable with everything and a wiz at least one thing. Also, if need be you can use those as a back up in another field (producing corporate videos, for example).

-Don't be romantic and think you're going to publish long magazine articles, or be a foreign correspondent, or win a Pulitzer. The chances of that are very, very slim, even if you're the most wonderful writer or sensitive journalist in the world, and most jobs won't give you the leeway to follow your passion.

-If you go to grad school in journalism, be realistic about your debt load. I’m $27K in student loans for Berkeley, and with every small monthly payment I make against that, I think of it as my “family tax” – the best outcome thus far of that debt is that I got to start the family I always wanted because I met my husband through grad school.

- If you're not comfortable with it already, become very adept and excited about rabid self-promotion. That's a massive part of the game now, and to be honest, it's the part I'm worst at (next to politely begging editors to get their heads out of their asses).

- If you move forward with this, in order to be successful, you're going to have to being unswervingly dedicated to your field, your conviction that you were meant to be a journalist and the notion that you are, without a doubt, hot shit.

I'm not sure I would have cornered myself by writing to make my living. When I was twenty-something, I had no idea how limiting that could be in the long run. Now, it doesn’t mean diddly squat if I’m a talented writer (which I’ve been told);  that I’m a fantastic, if exacting editor (which I’ve also been told); or even if I’m a nice person (which someone might have told me once or twice). 

In short: If you’re okay with being broke at 40, utterly dependent on your spouse’s income, unable to afford a down payment on a house or send your child to a good school, and a slave to anti-depressants to get through your days and Ambien to get through your nights because you can’t believe what a shithole your career is, by all means, go for it.

Sincerely,

Meghan

*I removed any identifying details and really let it fly in this public version. Rest assured that even I would never be this crass to some sweet kid.