Not So Green, and Sometimes a Little Bit Clouded

These eyes are not so green anymore, and sometimes they're a little bit clouded. Sunday will be a year and half of being here, so it's funny to read back on when I was so new. I'm not a veteran -- it takes a long time to get that way -- but I'm no longer the wide-eyed newbie, though I try to remember how that felt, and to bring that sense of wonder whenever I can. Sometimes I'll spin around and see a detail on a building I've never seen. Sometimes I'll tread a street in a direction I've never gone. If it all becomes too familiar and too much a blur, I challenge myself to find the newness: in that is the gratitude I want to keep.

I haven't become jaded, but I've been for a while in a job I don't like, which is kind of like being in a marriage you don't like, I'd imagine, in all the ways you have to subvert your true self, and the ways in which you justify it to yourself to keep on being in it, even though you know it's bad for you. It's quite a blow to self-respect. That might sound dramatic, but I'm not a person who can say, this is what I do all day -- over here, this is what I am. The two have to align for me to be happy. I suppose that's how it should be for all of us, but when I'm in a position to make it so, there's probably no excuse to be unhappy in my occupation. Not the recession, not anything -- when I compel myself to do a task I despise, I lose a certain amount of self-regard. If I'm not looking out for myself, who is?

At any rate, the job I hate is copyediting, which for me might as well be sweeping the floor -- in both jobs, you're cleaning up other people's messes. It's just that I'm allowed to do so little, when in the past I've done so much and more. And the act of sweeping and scrubbing the text until it's shiny turns my own mind soft, so that, by the end of the day, my attentiveness to others' work has sucked out any energy I might have dedicated to my own.

I've made steps forward. I found other part-time work: Reporting for the irascible, irreverent, rollicking city tabloid the New York Post, for which I'm sent around the five boroughs to stir up trouble and ask questions in such a way that I can deliver the sensationalist opinions my editors demand. I like it -- it sends me where I'd never go and where I've never been before, it gets me out of my shell to talk to people, and it gives me a taste of the kind of journalism I'd previously only read about. Sometimes my editors do not so much talk to me as bark -- I imagine them in fedoras, cigars, brandy. Probably all those trappings are absent anymore, but the gruffness, the lust for the story, still remains. This is the world I should keep up -- the other I must shed.

I never used to talk about work on here, and that's because I hardly had any. Now I have a lot and I suppose it's good -- New York is a city better enjoyed with money. And yet, I was in many ways happier then, newly arrived and underemployed, eating my thrice-weekly four-for-a-dollar dumplings. There's a lesson here. I just need to find a way to reconcile it with my hungry ambition.