Starving (Professionally)

It's occurred to me that while I’ve been shoving tough love and my particularly twisted form of  “wisdom” down your throats, I’ve overlooked certain logistics of life off the beaten path, most of them stemming from the fact that – like me – you’re probably broke as a joke. It’s definitely been harder out there as of late, especially for those trying to take risks . . .


The menial part-time jobs that used to keep people like us financially afloat while we put our better energies elsewhere are now mobbed like life rafts; it's a scene straight out of Titanic.

And here you though it was a tough to make ends meet before, right . . . ?

But still, it’s not all that bad.

This isn’t exactly a third world country we’re living in, after all. Your broke is still somebody else’s filthy rich.

Your quality of life doesn’t suck.

Now, having said that . . .

Here are some steps to take when tiptoeing around that exaggerated hole in your pocket:

Shop in your closet

As this first one is mostly – okay, entirely – for you ladies “roughin’ it” in between shopping sprees, I’m just gonna go ahead and get it out of the way.

(Somewhere my boyfriend is rolling his eyes as he reads this, but oh well.)

The urge to splurge can usually be satisfied simply by taking inventory of that which you already have, because there’s probably a few things still in bags or still wearing tags, things you've forgotten about or were saving for a special occasion.

Consider said occasion arrived.

Eat Right

And I don’t just mean eat “healthy,” which can be difficult even when you’re not on a budget. I mean pick when and where carefully.

Familiarize yourself with the best happy hours in your area and eat out accordingly. All those ½ price appetizers and drink specials will add up – in your bank account.

Seem like too much research . . . ? The King of Happy Hour can help :)

And anyways, grocery shopping is where it really gets tricky.

In addition to using coupons and getting a rewards card, you’re actually going to have to look at prices, past the brand name, and pay attention to how much something costs per ounce to get more bang for your buck.

In doing this you’ll probably notice that the cheaper foodstuffs tend to need certain “embellishments,” as in they need to be baked, marinated, sautéed, spiced, and so on.

Subsequently:

Learn how to cook

One, because you’re a grown-up (so grow-up already!) and two, because more often than not a cook can MacGyver something palatable from even the sparest of kitchens, where in times of great famine the non-cooks can only pray that their stores of Top Ramen don't run out.

Those who can't even boil water have to eat it dry, like animals . . .

I went to college. I’ve seen the horrors, and trust me when I say that you don’t want that to be you.

Take care of your ride

And I don’t just mean get it detailed. Check your fluids regularly, change your tires, and carpool whenever you can.

A mechanic’s bill is the last thing anyone needs, least of all you.

SAVE YOUR MONEY!

I say this because I’m the worst at it.

I say it also because you never know what’s going to happen, when and where you may be met with an opportunity, and what you might have to put upfront to pursue it.

“You can’t gamble scared,” but you can’t gamble period if there’s nothing to gamble with.

And be grateful . . . 

Yeah, there are downsides to your current lifestyle, but there are upsides, too.

I may have to pinch pennies, but on the days I’m writing from home, whether it’s in bed under a pile of dogs (and one cat) or sitting on my parents’ deck with a cup of coffee, it’s worth every penny not spent.

It settles me in a way a steady paycheck earned in a cubicle couldn’t.

It reminds me that all the things that I don’t have are just that:

Things . . .

Remember that and all that you truly “need” will come to the forefront.

XO, Mal

~

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The Pledge

I pledge allegiance to life off the beaten path, and the choice for which it stands, a dream, one that is mine and mine alone, and do solemnly swear never to give a shit or ever look back.

XO, Mal

~

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If the Stiletto Fits

Much of Mal Adjusted has so far focused on stepping off the beaten path and into the shoes of the fully realized, truest version of you.

When it comes to the style of those shoes, though, other people in your same neck of the woods might have a difference of opinion as to what's fitting.

I, for example, am a stiletto girl – the higher the better!

And I don’t hobble, thank you very much. 

I strut.

(In my dreams, I can fight in them, too. Like Catwoman.)

My mother gave me some serious stems, along with the rest of my looks, and I never felt the need to apologize them.

That is, until I became a writer . . .

While I’m sure most women have at one time or another felt pressured to dumb themselves down, it never once occurred to me that the rest of the “package” would be the biggest thing standing between me and the respect of my peers, writers and non-writers alike.   

I mean, I really was a good writer – a damn good writer for a recently converted art major – and that was all that mattered, right . . . ?

Yeah, right.

In the beginning, it was much more about working around peoples' assumptions of me than it was my work. If I gave a note in workshop (even a constructively critical one) I was being the mean girl. If I received a note and that note was positive, there was eye rolling . . .

This one girl, a bigger girl who only wore death metal concert tees and only wrote heavy-handed erotic fantasies, took particular glee in nitpicking my drafts to death with a red Sharpie.

She would always hand them back to me looking like a crime scene, and I would leave class wondering what I had ever done to her and what ground she thought she and all her horny heroines, their bosoms “overflowing” from their corsets, had to stand on . . .

I can only speculate as to her reasons – though I think I have a pretty good idea – but it wasn’t just my “packaging” that was getting me into trouble.

Once, I burst into tears because a poem that meant a lot to me, a poem I had worked harder on than any other poem that semester missed the mark in workshop. It was good, everyone said, better than good, but they hadn’t taken away from it what I had meant them to, and I was so frustrated.

My reaction was treated as a serious no-no, though. 

“Professional writers,” I was told, ought to be more detached from their work – 100% objective.

Well, objective I am not. Not when it comes to writing, nor have I ever been accused of being professional. Alas, in Writer World, where my writing was holding its own, I still didn't quite fit in.

For a while, I simmered in self-doubt.

Then, slowly, I boiled over with indignation. After that I just felt silly. Who I was as a person was not and never had been up for editing, least of all by other students – students! What did they know . . . ?

So what if I wasn't the consummate professional.

So what if I connected my thoughts with "like" a little too much.

So what if I liked to look cute, not like a librarian. If I want to wear stilettos so high the altitude would make Gisele herself feel faint everyday for the rest of my life, I'm allowed to because:

1) It's America.

2) It has nothing to do with my writing!

Just because a certain type of person tends to excel at a certain something doesn’t mean other types of people can’t also excel at it.

It also doesn’t mean that annoying constructs, like peoples’ reliance on social stereotypes, don’t still apply on some level.

It's not going to stop people (even the ones who are supposed to be on your side) from judging you, because they don’t like you, because they’re intimidated by you, because they don’t “get you,” or just because.

Blogging in stilettos, because I can.

Whether you’re an artist or a dancer, an entrepreneur or a rock climber, sooner or later there will come a time when, in a way you least expected, it feels like there’s even less wiggle room for individualism within your niche off the beaten path than there was on it.

When that happens, stick to your guns (or stilettos) and toss out the old saying; a duck doesn’t always walk like a duck . . .

Sometimes they strut ;)

XO, Mal

~

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Why I Love to Hate eBooks

Okay, so I don’t hate eBooks . . .

Deep as I am in the throes of writing my own novella – which may very well be published as an eBook – I would never want to be accused later on of biting the hand that feeds me.

(We’ll see about that.)

It’s more like this: I don’t consider eBooks real books, like Pinocchio wasn’t a real boy.

They’re alike, but they’re not the same.

Not even close.

eBooks don’t give me the same warm, fuzzy feeling that real books do, and if there’s anything you love the way I love writing, reading, the craft of words, then you know the warm, fuzzy feeling I’m talking about – and you know it’s big friggin’ deal.

I suppose I’m being a bit snooty . . . but then I’m not snooty about much.

Boxing, books, and beer – that’s it.

(Ali was a god who walked amongst men and Coors Light isn’t for drinking, it’s for playing beer pong, dagnabbit!) 

Something, I’m simply saying, has been lost in the transition from real books to eBooks.

For one thing, an eBook could never be my book. It couldn’t belong to me the way both my copies of The Last Unicorn do, one I’ve high-lighted front to back and continue to make notes in, one I’ve kept immaculate. It couldn’t belong to me the way my mother’s ancient volume of Shakespearean sonnets does, its spine hanging on by but threads, its gilded pages musty and yellow with time.

My "good" copy.

Hell, an eBook couldn’t even belong to me the way a perpetually damp issue of Analog Science Fiction & Fact – my dad’s favorite magazine – that I borrowed/stole from a hostel in Wollongong, Australia does. No eBook was ever such a vagabond, as no Kindle or Nook will ever have those same cute little wrinkles that a book gets along it’s spine from being laid facedown for lack of a bookmark because they don’t have spines – or pages, for that matter!

But as much as all that stuff drives me cuh-crazy, it goes beyond the flesh and bones of a book . . .

You see, in a real book’s leather-bound entirety – all books being massive leather-bound tomes in my perfect world, like at Hogwarts – it’s quite easy to forget how its author edited and re-edited, toiling and toiling, unable to sleep at times for the thousand and one nuances of their story that had yet to be properly placed, worded, or written down at all.

In its completeness, page numbers and every comma correctly in place, a good book can seem so effortless that it’s easy to forget that it did not in fact spring fully formed from the author’s head, like the goddess Athena from Zeus’ cracked skull.

Oh, quite the contrary.

Before Amazon.com, when our forefathers (and mothers) had to “walk to and from the bus stop barefoot in the snow, uphill both ways!” getting published was possibly even less fun.

Here’s the five-second version, courtesy of Wikipedia.

“Back in the day,” writers used to have to jump through hoop after flaming hoop just to get their work out there, to be able to release it into the jungle of literary works that we now call a Barnes & Noble, not knowing whether or not it’d be able to hold its own until it did or didn’t.

Selecting the font that work would be read in, selecting the color and weight of the paper it would be printed on were a writer’s final acts of love, formal wear given to the final product of their passion and dedication before sending it out into the world.

Nowadays, all you have to do is upload a Word document and press a button.

Sounds rather unceremonious, doesn’t it . . . ?

It's anticlimactic, at best . . . and bittersweet.

On the one hand, my chances of being published are better than they have ever been, statistically. On the other hand, I think I wish they weren’t.

As the popularity of online publishing rises and the quality of popular literature declines, it feels more and more as though the time of the greats (boxers and writers) has passed, and with it my opportunity to truly be tested.

I know throwing my hat in a ring where Twilight and 50 Shades of Grey are considered “heavyweights” is asking to be disappointed, but should it come to that . . . that too shall be a labor of love.

Kindle and Nooks be damned!

XO, Mal

~

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Putting the "Rock" in Rock Bottom

So, this week’s blog was inspired by this bug that seems to be going around, and by “bug” I mean that feeling of “Oh-em-gee, I’m twenty-five years old and have no idea what I’m doing!”

Whether it’s manifesting in your relationships, 

“Why do I keep dating different versions of the same douchebag . . . ?”

your friendships,

“When did we stop having anything in common . . . ?”

your career (or non-career),

“Thank you, recession!”

let me tell you why it’s actually good thing:

Remember the guy who simultaneously dumped me and bought me a puppy so I “had a reason to live” . . . ?

Well, while I now consider him a bullet dodged, at the time, he was the first guy who ever broke my heart – the one that made me realize we weren’t in high school anymore, practice was over and we’d upgraded to live ammunition.

If only it had been as through and through as a bullet hole, though . . .

While he was never the most mature guy in the room, I was completely unprepared for how immature he could be. Once, at a mutual friend’s graduation party, he drunkenly grabbed my a$$ and suggested/slurred that we should “get back together for the night.”

(Can I pick ‘em or can I pick ‘em . . . ?)

More than once I found myself torn between finding a dark place to curl-up in and die or using my powers as a 3^rd degree black belt for evil just once, by rearranging his face so his outsides would match his insides . . .

But what hurt the most was how our friends, my friends, stood by and watched, only two of them ever stepping in to shame him, to defend me. And me, being a child of divorce who knew all too well what it was like to be put in the middle of these things, didn’t feel I could stand up for myself believing that I would be doing them a disservice, that I would be “creating drama” somehow by demanding a little respect – for myself and for what (I thought) we had . . .

Winter break was a blur of loaded questions and generously spiked eggnog, and yet the new semester came too soon.

Having been dumped the first day of finals the semester before, my professors had been understanding and given me as much leeway as they fairly could; still, my GPA had taken a hit.

Furthermore, having just won my first award for creative writing, there was new, unwanted pressure. I couldn’t get away with half-assing it anymore, now that everyone knew I was good, but I couldn’t seem to summon up the will to care, either . . .

I wanted to be left alone, and I made sure everybody knew it. I didn’t bother with peer editing, handing back drafts without so much as a single correction. I kept my head down during workshops, puffy red eyes obscured by the anime-style bangs I used to think were cool.

People were beginning to get the feeling that I thought I was too good to be there, when the truth was I didn’t feel I deserved to be there at all.

I didn’t feel like writing.

I didn’t feel like breathing, but it was habit.

Basically, I spent a lot of long nights wrapped around my new puppy, sobbing into her fur until my stomach hurt and wondering what I had done to deserve my situation . . .

But you can only cry so much.

(I personally begin to resemble Yoda if I’ve cried enough.)

And you can only hate someone so much before you realize it’s not going to change them, it’s going to change you.

SO . . .

The United States, I decided, wasn’t big enough for both my ex and I.

A friend of mine – who was going through almost the exact same thing at almost the exact same time – and I put our heads together and six months’ worth of 70-hour school/work weeks later had ourselves a pair of tickets to Europe.

I puked my guts out all the way to the airport.

How symbolic, I remember thinking, and then, Get it out. Get it out now . . . ‘cuz this is where you’re leaving it.

Of course “it” (not the puke) was right there waiting for me when I got back 3 weeks later – baggage like that doesn’t just go away – but it didn’t seem as heavy.

Or maybe it had never been that heavy to begin with; what I’d seen and done in Europe had simply put it into perspective for me.

The Blue Mosque

Strikes in the streets of Athens, the 9 domes of the Blue Mosque humming with a thousand tiny echoes, the sun rise over Lake Zurich, a silver nazar necklace bought in Rhodes, riding donkeys down the twisty stone pathways of Santorini, drinking warm Guinness at the Gravity Bar in Dublin . . .

It had taken a hundred plus such experiences to remind me that the world was big, I was small, and that what I had suffered was neither – it was somewhere uncomfortably in the middle.

Getting dumped wasn’t the end of the world, but it also wasn’t something I could just stuff in with the rest of my baggage thinking I would never have to unpack it.

So instead of baggage, I began to think of it as “but a flesh wound.”

And, as sometimes the best thing for a wound is your own blood, to let it bleed a little, as sometimes the best thing for other kinds of wounds can also be messy and counterintuitive.

When we hit rock bottom, our first instinct is usually to “fix” it – to “pull it together” and not “dwell" on the situation – but it's that kneejerk reaction that robs us of the process of being able to look said situation square in the face, to assess what happened and how it happened, to own up to our mistakes, to let go of that which was beyond our control, from admitting to ourselves that we’re not “fine” and from grieving where grief is due.

Only when we let such feelings run their course can we honestly move on and be truly done with them (creative fodder aside).

And I while I know rock bottom can feel like the most vulnerable of places that way, it can also be the best place in the world to just STOP and THINK.

What went wrong . . . ?

What went right . . . ?

What did I learn . . . ?

What do I want . . . ?

Now is the time to be asking ourselves these questions – now, while we’re young and hungry with stamina and time still on our side – but without the whiplash of hitting rock bottom, too few of us will ever pause long enough to edit and readjust.

Too many of us will be kicking ourselves in twenty-five years for riding out the momentum of a job or a relationship just because it was going somewhere, only to get there and realize that it’s not somewhere we want to be.

(I mean, what if I had married that guy . . . ? Bleck!)

Or, because we can’t remember when and why we stopped wanting it.

The truth is, people change.

Dreams change.

So will you and yours, and it will be the time you’ve spent at hit rock bottom that will allow you to see yourself for who you are and the things that you want and need the most clearly.

Less sentimentally, our twenties are supposed to be an existential gladiator pit!

That’s what makes them so much fun :)

XO, Mal

~

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