California Love, Reprise

The ride is scenic. We follow a wall of rock; we pass over hills and through valleys. The land is incredible -- it makes the term "grounded" seem relative, 'cause you just cant stay grounded here: you can't help but lose yourself in dream. It is unlike anything I think of when I think of America. The trees twist in ways that make you forget you're close to desert and rock and sea all at once. I put my feet in the Pacific Ocean and it is perfectly cold, and power courses through my body. I feel this strange emptiness -- like I've never felt anything in my life until this moment -- a mix of nostalgia and excitement. I feel alone but on my own. There's just nothing like it on the East Coast. 

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I started writing this post on the Amtrak from San Diego to LAX, closing my five-day adventure in Southern California.

My trip to SoCal was filled with laughs and memories -- from the San Diego Zoo to just about every bar in Pacific Beach. But what I took from it was the lifestyle, the feeling. We went out with locals and wandered; and I found that this was a place I could, and would live.

My parents warned me about this. They knew I would fall in love with California and wouldn't ever want to leave, but I honestly wasn't prepared for this. When I realized we were really leaving California, I felt physical pain in my heart -- that sunken knot in your chest you feel after a bad break up or when you deeply miss someone you love.

And I love California, in the purest sense of the word.

I am forced to face it as I pass by the hills and freeways, houses built on top of and into hills. It reminds me too much of Italy this way. I find myself thinking/feeling the same things I did when I was leaving Perugia. And also like Italy, coming home -- home to the cold, stagnant, stability and dependence -- feels like paralysis.

Living at home means ultimately having to answer to someone, which inhibits what you do and how you spend your day. You can't just do as your please. This inevitable consciousness of your parents' presence rekindles that adolescent dependence on their approval -- the inability to do something, something significant, without permission. Therefore, you suddenly feel incapable of making decisions on your own. You've regressed to childhood.

Of course coming back from Cali was difficult because it was a beautiful place and a good time. But it was that much harder because being there was also a glimpse of my life as I once knew it: doing as I please, being young and being surrounded by other young people, laughing nonstop and constant stimulation. And what better a place to do so than Southern California, where fun feels effortless.

However, my new found love has me even more torn over an issue I've debated now for years, since I left Italy actually: the importance of career opportunity versus love for your land. Yes, both of these can coexist, but in many places it does present a problem.

When I met with the WWD contact in L.A., she told me that if I am most concerned with becoming the Editor at a magazine, I should go to New York. The greatest job market, especially in journalism, is in New York. But if I still don't know, if I am open to possibility, to just go somewhere I love. Well, I love San Diego. I want to live there, but there is hardly what you'd call a job market, especially not for me.

So the question I ask myself lately is, which is more important: greater job opportunity or land? Is it your profession or your place of residence that will bring you closer to fulfillment? I assure you that the answer will be different for everyone; and I suspect that most people will, like me, struggle to find an answer that satisfies them. So, I present you all a little something to muse over your Thanksgiving food coma... What do you think is most important?

A happy holiday to all...

...

California Love...

So it is 3:42 am on Friday, November 12th and I am heading off for my first trip out to California. Just posting to inform you that I wont be writing for the next five days. The trip was planned on a bit of a whim about a month ago when my friend Ricky announced that he was going to San Diego to present in a Neuroscience convention. My friend Colby and I tagged along. We will be visiting two of my cousins, and I am meeting a professional contact at WWD, Conde Nast Publications L.A. office through an internship I had in New York a few years back. I am pretty sure they don't have a job for me, but you never know what might come of it. Hopefully, I will have something good to report when I get back. Wish me luck!

This weekend I went back to my alma mater, Muhlenberg College, to visit my boyfriend. You think it'd be great going back to the place that helped you grow into the person you are, where you made lifelong friends, and opened your mind up to a world of possibilities, until you get there and realize: "Wait, who are all these people?" and "That guy looks like he's 14."

I had a great time with Ben, but it was so strange to walk around that campus -- a place I once called "home" -- and know I didn't belong there anymore. I spent the whole weekend trying to dodge the masses because I wanted to avoid the "what are you doing here" look on people's faces; and even more so, I just couldn't bear to face that same, haunting question again: "So what are you doing now?"

To those of us who aren't doing anything, this question is the ultimate blow to the ego -- the punch to the gut. I dread having conversations with strangers, and thus somewhat dread meeting new people these days solely because of this question and many others like it. I think you can probably empathize when I say sometimes I just want to reply: "It's none of your damn business."

I'm becoming a grump.

Okay, I'm being melodramatic... I am not a grump. I am just sick of feeling like I need to have an excuse tagged on the end of every "still searching for a job..." along with a list of 10 things I'm "trying to work on right now." Talk about pressure!

I don't want to get testy with people on the repeated subject of the "job search", and I don't want to leave every post-grad-plan conversation with a sour puss face and elevated blood pressure. Clearly people are just asking to try to be nice/sound interested/make conversation, and I know that 99% of the time no one is judging me, except myself.

And that's when I realized that it is just me. There's this little piece in each of us that doesn't have complete faith in ourselves, and that's the piece of you that gets so temperamental. The problem is that piece is magnified right now; our insecurities are like white blood cells attacking a virus, heading straight to the part that's lacking: our fulfillment.

It's really hard right now, and no one is jumping through hoops to hire you anyway so you start to feel like why bother. We feel stuck with this looming fear that we'll never find anything that makes us happy. Which turns into: if we are getting this discouraged and frustrated now, what does that mean for our future?

I have to be honest, today I am feeling kind of low. On days like this I wonder if I'll ever find a job, or that I'll get stuck doing something I just spent years of time and money trying to avoid doing. I even start to question decisions I made months or even years ago that I haven't looked back on until now: "Maybe I should have pursued that Business Minor instead; what if I had gotten a second internship?" Why am I even thinking about these things, because since when are those very minor details even that important? Especially in a time where nearly the only people I know who have jobs got them through connections.

It's like a relationship gone stale: your mind keeps running through memories and moments you had, the decisions you made, looking for what you could have changed that would have changed the position you are in now.

So why are these trivial decisions in my life up until this point haunting me?


I guess it comes down to two things that all humans share: fear and the desire for control. Of course it is scary to think that we could have had some control at some point over the position we're in now. And the only reason this position is scary in the first place, is because we fear that we may never get out of it -- that the "rut" that we keep reminding ourselves is temporary because we "just graduated" could become permanent.

All I can say to that is: yes, it is true that had I never changed my minor from business to art, or decided to participate in fewer extra curricular activities so I could spend more time on my school work, or had I taken a different route on dozens of decisions in my undergrad life, I may have ended up in a slightly different position. Maybe I would have a job or been in graduate school, but I -- and you -- have to keep in mind that there is a reason we did not make those decisions the first time around. Sure, some of our reasons were probably better than others -- I probably could have spent more time studying for that test if I skipped the dinner party with my friends -- but really, which of those things do you remember now that you are standing here longingly looking back?

I remember every dinner party, but I could not tell you what that test was on or how I felt while I was taking it. I can't even remember what grade I got on it. School work is your priority in college. But, as one of my professors used to always say jokingly, "studying is always interfering with college," and the "college" of that statement is the part that's going to stay in your heart forever.

Now I'm not urging you who are still in school to ditch your work and party. Rather, I am acknowledging the fact that we have all had to make a lot of tough decisions as students; and while many of them we could have made differently, our lives will always have an abundance of decisions to make... we didn't blow our one shot. Just because we didn't choose the path we thought we would when we started, or even when we graduated college doesn't mean that we need to be ready with a list of excuses for our current status. No one will think you're nuts for saying, "I honestly don't know what I want to do with my life yet." You may find some people will look taken aback, but most will answer -- even at two or three times your age and wisdom -- "Hey, neither do I."

Thanks for letting me vent today. Stay tuned -- this week I'll be looking for the cure to restore faith in the self.

The Costume Shop of Job Searching

First off, Happy (belated) Halloween! Hope everyone had a great time this weekend in all your garbs and guises.

Halloween is always so much fun because it's one night where you can be somebody else. Ever notice how different the atmosphere is at a costume party from a regular night out? It's because there is something so simply liberating about being in disguise. You can be anyone you want; you can act out of the norm without feeling the self-consciousness you feel in your daily attire. What confines we put ourselves in!

This whole idea of being freed by the masquerade made me start to think about some of the guises we slip on during our daily routine. So remember what I mentioned in my "Home... is Where I Wanna Be" post when you feel like your parents or childhood friends don't know the whole you anymore? Well, it's kind of like that. You feel like you are almost confined to a certain version of yourself when you are around certain people: teachers, parents, grandparents, friends, boy/girlfriends, the kid who sells you your morning coffee... And, if we are subject to different versions of ourselves based on the people we choose to surround ourselves with, then wouldn't the same thing go for which graduate program, city you live in, or job you choose to take?

Try looking at it this way: it's weird to think about when you have only been out of college for less than a year, but your profession is something you use to define yourself. For example, a year ago, when someone would ask me to tell them a little bit about myself I would say: "My name is Christina Garofalo, I am a student at Muhlenberg College, and I live at the Jersey Shore."  Now there is usually further conversation where you'd get to know more about one another, but the launching pad for that further conversation is rooted in those first three introductory points.

You've all gotten it before, the: "Oh, my cousin went to Muhlenberg. What a small world!" or "Where about on the Jersey Shore do you live? I have a beach house there." The frequency that this very same conversation has happened over mine, and probably most of your lives is unreal. It becomes almost a recording. That alone should tell you, if not urge you, to realize how important the career and life choices we make and how they reflect on who we are.

Which leads me to my next point: to settle for a career that does not fulfill you will ultimately affect the way your define yourself and the attitude with which you define yourself. And what does that mean? A major identity crisis. So, let's spare ourselves the mental breakdown at age 45 because we've realized that we took the road so highly traveled that we've been stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic for the last 20 years. Instead, why not take the time now, while we are young and can still afford to be a bit selfish, and experiment? Let's use this time to try on as many different personae as possible, and from there, we might actually learn something worthwhile about what kind of career might make us happy for the long haul.

In light of my Portland, OR craze, my friend Carly lent me a book called Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk in Portland, Oregon by Chuck Palahniuk. The first line of the book says, "Everyone in Portland is living a minimum of three lives,' says Katherine Dunn, the author of Geek Love. She says, 'Everyone has at least three identities... They're a grocery store checker, an archaeologist, and a biker guy... Or they're a poet, a drag queen, and a bookstore clerk."

As if I needed more reason to love this city, here it is -- the proof of my theory, along with some relief in its truth. We are all constantly trying to imagine some more sophisticated version of ourselves working in different jobs -- imagining what our lives would be like if we were a copy writer, social worker, lawyer, psychologist, teacher, etc. -- and judging what we should do by what we can "see ourselves" doing.  But how accurate is that really?

Every person has interests, hobbies, and talents outside of their profession. And of course, the ideal situation would be to get paid for our hobbies, but that can't always be the case. I mean, the likelihood of you making a living off of your coin collection is minimal. So instead, I'm led to believe that the best we can do is to imagine which of these jobs best compliments the other important aspects of our lives.

Maybe the most important things to you are to be able to provide a comfortable life for your family and to help people. If this is the case, health care might be the perfect track for you then. I write poetry, prose, and short fiction; so I might think of what kinds of jobs would enhance my writing versus which might stifle it. From exploring different options and ideas, I learned that the only things that make me fulfilled are creating (art, poetry) and helping people. And though it's very broad, it's a start.

See if you can take some time to figure out which types of things make you feel like you've done something worth your while. From there, start to try on different professional personae, and when you find one that might fit, go for it!

Last week, I had coffee with my dad and talked to him about all of what I'm talking to you about. I told him all my ideas, the things I learned that I like, and what I need to have a shot at fulfillment. He mentioned that my uncle might be able to help. So they spoke, and then I reached out to him via Facebook. My uncle Robert is a physician in Chicago. He told me he has a number of connections and might be able to help me find a job out there. The prospect of moving to a new city, let alone Chicago, was exciting enough. But, to have a good job out there could be just what I need.

We still have to talk in some more depth, but a possibility could be something like grant-writing for a nonprofit medical clinic. And while grant-writing isn't very creative, it could make for a more well-rounded writing resume and it would qualify as "helping people" on my musts for fulfillment. And, as a writer, I have found that I have more of an impulse to write (creatively) when I am intellectually stimulated by those needs.


While nothing is final, and the details still need a lot of working out, it is at the very least something to look forward to and get my spirits up. And if it doesn't work out, I figure I can always be a poet, a drag queen, and a bookstore clerk.

Have a great day everyone!