Bend Over and Grab the Ankles
Question: Why did no one with any semblance of professional qualifications bother to inform me during the past--oh, I don't know--four years that wasting thousands of dollars pursuing a "practical" degree was, in reality, damning myself on a one-way train to the land of starving artists?

Perhaps I forgot to inform the snotty woman at the magazine where I interviewed today that I don't care about an internship. Or, that I don't care about being yet another slave, more like cheap labor, to simply be demeaned as a quasi-student, a joke of a human being, while my friends go on to have real lives complete with, say, places to live, health insurance, toasters and TiVo.

Someone please inform her that long before I became a failure, I was someone with success written all over him, someone who could still hide behind the veil of school, with its sharply written rules, someone who was so diverse with his interests that he fooled everyone into thinking he could survive in a world beyond school, where the rules were different and he methods of success no long applied.

Tell her that I see through her mirage of hope, and that after 5 meaningless months of monkey work I did for better pay 3 years ago, there won't be any pot of gold for me. Tell her that I know I'll be in the same boat, dealing with the same damn clueless HR mavens, answering the same incessant questions--only this time trying to pay off $30,000 I don't have that I borrowed for a degree I didn't need and that doesn't help me.

Tell her that my vision of success doesn't include researching prize homes for sale in Bethesda for $6.15 per hour.

Tell her I don't care about some damn dream New York fantasy, and that all I want is a place to live that isn't someone else's, to be able to say for once that I'm not mooching from someone.

Someone tell her that I'm more than just a joke.

Someone tell her that, if she decides to give me this internship and needs to get ahold of me, I'll be drowning myself in the Potomac.

I'm with you--screw consulting. But if you're going to be a ballerina, can I have your old job?