My Future Life

First- print Journalist. In this vision I am sitting at my desk, and I have 412 unread email messages. I write back witty, one line responses to every single one of them that manage to capture the universality of our human experience, and also manipulate them into writing something honest back to me in response. It’s a good kind of manipulation. I’m cutting through bullshit. I write a blog post about one of the emails. My blog post gets 45 comments from people, half of whom are haters. I show the hater comments to my editor and we laugh together about how stupid people are. I am filled with love and joy for all human beings, especially the ones around me.

In the other vision, I am alone on my computer, trying to pump out a 430 word response to a theatre performance I didn’t like. I know the director personally. I need to write honestly because my readers expect that from me, but I don’t know if I’ll ever be invited back to review another show again if I give my real opinion. I have no one to talk to about this. All of my ideas are cliché. I become paranoid like Emily Gould and am unable to leave my apartment.

Second-memoirist. In this vision, I write about my family from the vantage of someone who’s had a lot of psychotherapy and can now laugh about fucked up shit without scaring people. I am really really completely alone, writing in my room. I am bored out of my brain, wearing sweatpants all day long and getting stoned. I write panicked emails to my mother asking her “is it okay if I say….” And the response is always “NO! SONNY BOY! DON’T WRITE ABOUT ME!!” “But mom! You’re hilarious! This deserves an audience!” I write back “Your answering machines capture the truth of what it means to be the son of a loving, warm, Jewish mother! Your emails are amazing! I want to write about you because I love you!” I get no response, except from my father who leaves a voicemail that says “Mom is very upset now.”

Third-college professor. In this vision, I work at a good college where students raise their hands. I know a lot about this one really really obscure thing that matters more than any other really really obscure thing. My classes are really small, and by the time we’re done discussing how my research relates to the point of existence, we’re all so over-stimulated that it seems like my classroom just might be the most important, exciting, illuminating place in the world; more important than the Oval Office, more exciting than the Nobel Prize Awards Show, more illuminating than the New Yorker Festival. In fact, someone in class brings up the New Yorker Festival and says they went last year and my class is more illuminating.

In the other vision, I work at a big school and get paid roughly the same amount per hour as someone at McDonalds. I cannot write one more thing about that really obscure thing I decided to devote my life to without my head exploding. Half my students come to class, and the others bring their laptops, which I am then forced to ban, inspiring hatred of me. I dumb down the way I talk because most of my students aren’t the brightest bulbs in the barrel and the only smart girl in the class looks at me with disappointment and intellectual longing.

Fourth-NPR. In this vision, I work at the NPR offices in Seattle, and field questions from people all across our fair nation. I exercise a lot, which lowers my voice and makes me sound calm and inhumanly reasonable. My friends are all calm, inhumanely reasonable people and we read essays about our childhood to each other, and write poetic emails that capture what it means to be alive. People tell me I “bring the funny” to NPR and that things will never be the same there again. I’m able to make the radio audience laugh about terrible things like bombings and genocide by extracting witty commentary from survivors. But no one would call me manipulative, I just bring out that side of people. Finally, Americans understand what it means to go through a war, or a bombing, because they feel bonded with the survivors. My life is filled with joy and friendship and witty warm friends who are very dramatic about things and like to turn off the lights when they introduce me to new music.