reflections

I was looking through old stuff. When I am home, I look through old stuff a lot. I looked at a lot of photos from the time when I didn't have a computer after I graduated. I put them on my brother's computer and now they're on my dad's computer. It is strange to not see photos for so long that are from not that long ago.

I also read some old blog posts, from this time last year. Dated September 15th:

Pros about the AmeriCorps job:

Move to Philly

Do good for humanity

And therefore, my soul or whatever

Do good for my resume

Gain experience

Make future job connections?

Move forward in life, rather than sitting still/being paused

Cons:

Have to move to Philly, which means finding roommates and an apartment that don’t suck but are cheap and not in a terrible area [mlc-ily]

Get paid practically absolutely nothing

I don't like doing things my dad disapproves of, although he warmed up to the kitten pretty quickly after saying no.

The big thing about this is, I would be living in poverty for a year. At the beginning of the summer I didn’t have any money at all. I couldn’t stop at McDonalds and buy a sweet tea, I had a million things I wanted to buy (needs and wants) that I couldn’t, I couldn’t travel to visit my friends because I had no money for gas or bus tickets. I owed (and still do owe) a lot of people money. It really sucked. But then I got my job and it is slowly fixing itself. But if I took this job, I would know it wasn’t going to get better for a whole year. I don’t know if I would be able to go out to eat, ever, or out to drink, or travel.

But the fact that I am considering not doing this because of a mere year of not being able to have what I want makes me feel selfish. What’s a year, really? I won’t starve. I think I can quit if I want to. It will probably be good for me to experience. Transcendental. Minimalist. I'll live like Gandhi and eat oatmeal all the time, which Matt suggested and then said wasn't actually a good idea. I don’t know. We’ll see.

What I have to say now is this: Poverty schmoverty. Don't get me wrong. Poverty is obviously a very real thing. But not for college-educated white girls with doctor dads. Also, food stamps enabled me to eat all the fresh produce and soy products I could ever want. Also, it's good to want. And to not get everything that you do want. And I still managed to travel plenty in the past year (let's see...D.C., St. Augustine, Chicago, New York a bunch of times, Boston and a thousand trips to Mountain Top) plus I bought a plane ticket to Athens. For crying out loud. I kind of wish I had only eaten oatmeal for the past year though. In those old pictures I was pretty skinny. Soon my food stamps will run out and I won't spoil myself so much anymore.

I was right about all those pros, and I was wrong about all those cons. I actually feel like a big idiot for having worried about mcdonald's sweet tea. Oh, georgia.

this time last year