Last night I was on the F train, which turned into a C train, which left me on the wrong side of Manhattan at 12AM on a Sunday evening. There were teenagers who wreaked of tobacco while blasting videos with poor sound quality. There was a man with a poorly situated hole in his trousers. There was another man who had spilled what smelled like a vanilla chai latte from Dunkin’ Donuts, who was organizing a pile of another spilled substance that looked like a combination of oatmeal and bits of dry wall.
So one has to ask, if this is what Manhattan looks like almost each and every Sunday, why does anyone go out on Sunday at all?
I am a millennial with two Masters degrees and several part-time jobs, none of which provide me with benefits or a competitive salary. In fact, I am making half of what I thought I would after finishing grad school doing something I swore I’d never do. But maybe I should have seen this coming as the same thing happened four years ago when I graduated top of the class with a BA in Literature, and no job offers.
It’s not that I don’t like what I do: I enjoy talking to young people and teaching them how to write. I just wish I didn’t have to. I wish I didn’t have to do so much grading. I wish I didn’t have to talk to my boss about the surveys my students fill out. I wish I didn’t have to babysit on Sundays to have enough money to pay my student loans.
Virginia Valenzuela 