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There was a moment this summer when I’d finally worked up the courage to print my resume, walk it down to my neighborhood bookstore, and offer it to the man at the counter. As I was about to leave, resume in hand, I made a quick but sincere confession to my mother: “I’m scared.” “Why?” “Well, I don’t know. I don’t really have any skills.” “Honey, don’t worry, even if they do hire you, they’ll fire you soon after that!” My mother was, of course, kidding. I burst into tears. Even to someone who knows me so well, not to mention old friends and professors, my goal of working in a bookstore seems random and silly. If I have just graduated from a wonderful liberal arts school, am passionate about Russian, and love books, why wouldn’t I, say, apply to grad school (or to the CIA for the matter?)?  That is the question they ask themselves for me. The question I ask myself is: If I’ve just graduated from a wonderful liberal arts school, am passionate about Russian, and love books, why is it that this machine called the cash register frightens me more than the GREs? I’ve grown to be comfortable in, and to love, my world of books, papers, exams, and study groups, a world in which learning is equivalent to achievement. It is all I know. Six months out of college, I still pick up books with every intention of taking notes, of studying. I didn’t notice when my world’s currency switched. When I am asked how much money I am making, or what sort of job I have, I just can’t answer, “Oh, I finished that paper,” or “I failed that test.” It’s hard to admit that the biggest challenge for me is to accept a bookstore job, work that cash register, face unhappy customers, and return home without a grade to show for it.
It turns out that the infamously protective college bubble common to small liberal arts schools was not simply a consequence of isolated geography. I packed up the bubble and brought it back to San Francisco with me, and found every excuse to continue college post-college. Emerging from my world will not be dramatic, or heroic, and all I will have to show for it will be some basic life skills: common sense, and cash-registering, for instance. So yes, it is silly -- but also quite honest -- when I sometimes confess that I’m scared.
It’s hard to negotiate long-term dreams with short-term realities. Instead of dutifully filling out work applications, I admire the course listings of various graduate schools and inquire about jobs abroad. I think about living in Russia, or teaching when I’m thirty, and my life now assumes a sense of waiting. I have not figured out how the here and now will bring about the elusive then and there. I can’t picture my present self, having worked at a bookstore, being all the more experienced for it in ten years. I mistakenly imagine that the decisions I make now, and the work that I do, will have no relation to the person I will become.
There are many examples, in literature and life, of people postponing their lives in waiting, ignoring the present while revering the future. But my actions and jobs right now, however trivial they may be or seem, are not meaningless. They are the only things that will teach me to have faith in my present self, and remind me not to continue deferring life to the future. Perhaps tackling the mysteries of the cash register will prove inspirational; or, more likely still, the realities of a retail clerk’s existence will be bore me into FINALLY taking the GRE. Either way, surrendering up that resume under the customer service agent’s watchful eye was an act of diplomacy – a cooperative offering, however small, from my insular world to bigger, meaner, fast-paced “other.” And for now, while adult life lingers somewhere in my mind, my present self will be fully content to stand behind a cash register.
- Elizabeth Geballe Illustration by Gustaf von Arbin |
