Allow me to introduce myself.

Hi,

This bit of writing is about my life as a post-undergraduate student.

I'm twenty three, a white female, and I have just moved back home. I wish I could say it was my first time, but it's actually the third. I moved back for six months after my first year of college and attended community college for a semester. After moving into my own apartment and attending a new university, I studied abroad for a semester and upon returning, and having spent all my money, I moved in with my parents a second time for my final semester. Then I graduated last December. Feeling fresh, vivacious, and newly infused with a can-do spirit that only a college diploma can bestow, I moved into a house with my best friend Maggie and my boyfriend Aaron. In the six months we managed to keep the house, I couldn't achieve gainful employment. Since April, I've been fired three times and have had four jobs. I've never done the math (well, counted), but I would bet that I sent my resume to about 50 people on Craigslist. With no job and with our landlord selling our house, the three of us decided to go our separate ways. We had too, really.

I used to want to be a writer, so I had applied—and managed to retain for a month—a relative dream job working for a magazine. But I was soon revealed to be vastly under qualified, and it was only a matter of time before I got the axe. I've worked as a secretary, a waitress, and a hostess. Now I'm waiting tables and working part-time in a used DVD and video game store called Entertainmart.

I still want to write. I also want some money, so I'm not quiting either of my day jobs (Actually, I took on a third, joining the roster for a babysitting service so that on my days off, I can try to make a few extra dollars.) But, like David Rakoff said, and like I learned during my time at the magazine, “[w]riting is like pulling teeth. With your dick.” After majoring in English, I don't feel like I should stop. I don't want to stop, really. That's where my reason for writing this blog comes from. I don't think of myself as a reporter from the front lines of a recession. I don't know that I want to contribute to any of the depressing conversations about higher education that merely seem to crush the soul rather than enlighten my outlook. I simply just don't think I should stop.

This is a place to for me to narrate some of the episodes of my life since graduating. I hope that out of this process, these fractured sets of experiences will begin to look like a whole, and that the complete set takes the shape of a story rather than a set of random, first-world tragedies. No matter how poor, lonely or pathetic a person can feel, there is a small, rapt audience hanging out inside her head, and this is my attempt to honor them as well.

Hope you like it.