• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1107 0

a series of frustrations and misplaced motivation, which I imagine is not so unusual for anyone who has ever started writing a blog. I moved to New York immediately after finishing college. I had spent the last semester of my senior year not in Boston, where my school was based, but at a university in Taipei through a scholarship program. I tutored English to college students twenty hours per week, while the rest of the time I finished up the few credits I needed to graduate and, for the most part, explored the city, especially its food. By the time I landed back in the States, took off my cap and gown, and began looking for jobs in New York, I was more than a little disoriented, and perhaps disillusioned. But I knew that this was where I wanted to live. New York City was only a short train ride from my hometown, and during college I’d spent every summer living in apartment sublets there, working in book-publishing internships and as a barista at coffee shops. It felt like home already. Thanks to those internships, I quickly found a job as an editorial assistant at a publishing house. I cobbled together some furniture, found roommates on Craigslist, and bought a fresh wardrobe to begin my adult life.

For my first year on my own, I was earning a salary of $27,500 a year and living in a cramped, three-bedroom apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn. These conditions didn’t offer much leeway in terms of leisure spending. They were hardly amenable to eating in restaurants all the time. Still, I was eating out—and so, it seemed, was everyone else I knew. I bought my lunch from nearby delis, soup shops, cheap sushi places, and the occasional street vendor and would scour midtown for the best-tasting bang for my buck. Pretty soon, I realized that trying to find a reasonable and satisfying meal in midtown Manhattan was like searching for fool’s gold. No matter how hard I tried, it was a barren wasteland, food-wise. The type of food and the prices at local lunch spots that I’d go to—that everyone went to—on a daily basis were almost like branches of the same fast-food chain. And to fill up for the rest of the afternoon, I found it nearly impossible to spend less than $7. It wasn’t just the expense that irked me, though. Picking at the bright orange salmon roe that clung to my wooden chopsticks from sushi rolls, I’d wonder how on earth it had gotten there, to that deli a few doors down, in so many stacks of identical plastic cartons. Summoning my best inner William Blake, I’d ask the morsel at the end of my fork, “Little lamb meatball, who made thee?” I was tired of mindlessly forcing down food when I had no idea where it came from or how it was made.

At night, I went out with friends for live music, art exhibits, and movies, and tried to seek out the city’s best-kept-secret restaurants and bars. I began to feel more and more like all this culture I was so anxious to soak in was where my real passions lay, and that it had little to do with my workday. I was horrible at organizing my two bosses’ schedules and paperwork, too, which was unfortunately the brunt of my job. I could never seem to photocopy an entire important document without missing pages. And I didn’t have much in common with the four coworkers in my department who were my age, and whose names, strangely (or not strangely) enough, were either Sarah or Megan.

I began dating a graphic designer who worked two floors below me. I lost pretty much any other interest in my job, and it showed. I’d take long breaks, arrive late every morning, and dream about how I could best take advantage of my paid vacation days. I took a weeklong trip to Thailand that winter, and when it was over, I came back to the same desk and the same cluelessness about what I was doing there.

In 2005, just after I had been at the publishing house for one year, I was called into my boss’s office and told that I wasn’t “a good fit.” I was given two weeks’ severance pay and asked to pack up my desk that day. Once I gathered all my stuff and said my awkward good-byes, I walked out of the office building for the