I'm Only Here for the WiFi by Chelsea Fagan Read Free Book Online

technically you can scrape by and talk about how you’re “high on the energy of the city,” but you’re certainly not going to afford being high on anything else.
    There are so many other places you could be, both around America and around the world at large that would enable you tobalance out your financial life a little more. And, in the interest of full disclosure, I did live in Paris myself when I didn’t have a fancy grown-up job, but I was a student, working as an au pair (a glorified nanny), and lived in one hundred square feet. Do you know what one hundred square feet looks like? It is unfortunate and in no way allows you to fully enjoy The City for all the majesty it has to offer you. You don’t want to be toiling away in that lifestyle when you’re nearing thirty.
    And as to a job you enjoy, there is a good chance that landing one will severely damage your social life potential, as well as any chance of highly lucrative compensation. We often see people who are “married to their work,” and that means exactly what it sounds like. They are always spending excessive time with it, sacrificing everything else for it, and generally being defined by it. A lot of people who work in the more “glamorous” professions, such as the arts or PR or TV production, tend to be of this persuasion. They would essentially give at least two of their appendages to have more professional success, and everything about them tends to center on how well their job has been going lately. It’s pretty clear with a lot of this group—from the DJ/web designer in a rotating carousel of Snapbacks, to the writer who has an impressive résumé of prestigious bylines that don’t actually pay—that the money is not always overflowing to compensate them for the effort. Speaking personally, as a writer, every time you ever announce that you work in such a profession, you areimmediately met with an open look of smug disbelief and a demand for further clarification.
    Or, if you are being fairly paid, it often comes at the expense of any time out and about. There comes a moment in many of these “passion” jobs when, at two in the morning on a Friday night, when you’re still hard at work on a project that you are putting extra time in without having been asked to (and with no prospect of compensation), where you sort of take a long, hard look at your life and wonder how exactly you came to be “that guy.” None of us wants to feel like we have sacrificed a balanced, fun life for being the MVP at work several months in a row. Regardless of how much money we might make, or how admired we may be by our coworkers, it certainly seems as if we must live a pretty pointless life. So if you are in hot pursuit of a job that makes your heart go all aflutter, it may behoove you to resign yourself to at least a few years of being Career Guy, even if you hate to admit it.
    No matter what you are looking for in your job, or what you end up doing, it’s only important that it makes you happy. It could be bringing in ample money, giving you a super-flexible schedule, or simply making you feel as if you accomplished something at the end of the day. It could be the job of your dreams or just something that provides you with money to travel to all your various fetish conventions around the country. At the end of the day, you’re the one who has to sit on your bed, take off your shoes, and think about what you accomplished (as well as what lies ahead ofyou). And if it makes you hate your life and everything about it, or makes you question your worth even a little bit, you should probably pull up your résumé and start fluffing it up, because you’ve got some applications to fill out.

F irst and foremost, what is a hobby? So many of us go from the ages of birth to twenty-two-ish without ever having taken that into consideration. It’s a word that has general meaning