Blegh

And so the summer begins. How that season which incurred so much merriment in my youth has turned into a dour, bottomless pit of boredom and despair. What, exactly, is a married adult supposed to do with three months of nothing? Why does graduate school give us summer vacation? That’s not long enough to get a job anywhere except retail, at best it allows you to land an unpaid internship. I cant fathom how many students, who are way more broke than I, manage to survive this period of time. Many of them, I know, hunker down in their parents’ house and wait it out. Probably a wise plan, or at least as wise a reaction as is possible in such circumstances.

I have friends who have nearly landed so many great jobs only to discover they would be required to work in September. Isn’t it a little adolescent to just release us into the wild for a bunch of fortnights? Why is this a necessary thing to do? I’ve been dreading these months all semester, and now they are here at last in all their awfulness. As hard as the job search is in my career already, it gets compounded again by looking for work in such an insane, stupid little vacuum.

You might say to me, “Andrew, hasn’t it been this way for awhile? Aren’t there companies who expect to hire students?” Yes. There are. Most of them will work you through the weekend and callously refuse to pay you a dime, and that’s if you’re lucky enough to actually get hired. Even better, you won’t do anything you can actually use, in many cases you’ll just stand around or make copies and dream about updating your resume. It’s a cold, dark world. These, of course, are the necessary sufferings of the business we are in, and there is simply no way around them. The worst part about it is it makes you doubt yourself. You stand there guarding some wires on a sidewalk, feeling guilty for not being excited. “Maybe I don’t have what it takes,” you think to yourself.  The truth is, being ignored is worse than being hated in many ways, and ignored is just what you are when you start out.

This is a period of my life where I’m just going to have to learn to be tougher than I am now. And also more patient. I don’t mean to sound like all those sourpusses out there who gripe about how tough Hollywood is, I made a vow to myself I would never be one of those people and I won’t. I don’t intend this entry as any kind of lesson about anything, I’m just blowing off some steam. I’ll feel differently after a few days.