Five Things I Can't Live Without Read Online Free PDF Page B

me:

Under construction
About you:

Under construction
Last book I read:

What Should I Do With My Life?
Biggest turn-on:

Under construction
Biggest turnoff:

Under construction
Five things I can’t live without:

Under construction
Most embarrassing moment:

The window incident

    D an was right: I had no plan. And every time he tried to initiate one of his patented dream/goal/objectives conversations with me, I wriggled away. I hadn’t slept in four nights, and the glow of self-determination had burned out, replaced by the terrible realization that I had not a prospect in sight. I’d just been drifting along, waiting for something to lift me out of my life, as if a publisher from Conde Nast would go looking for a puppy on the animal rescue Web site and be so struck by one of my bios that she’d recruit me right then and there. I’d tripped into that job and even though I never meant to stay, I’d done nothing to leave: I’d long ago stopped looking at job listings or trying to network, and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d considered the next step in my career. When was the last time I’d even used the word “career” in a sentence? Maybe meta-life was an elaborate scheme cooked up by my brain to avoid realistically thinking about the future.

    On Sunday morning, Dan and I went to brunch, the meal that was always my treat. I’d been keeping my rising anxiety to myself because I didn’t want him to think he was moving in with a basket case. (He’d signed on for the manicured neuroticism of, say, Bridget Jones; I couldn’t suddenly give him Zelda Fitzgerald.) But that day, when he ordered a mimosa, it took a concentrated act of will to avoid screaming, “Are you trying to break me here?!!” My stomach was knotted with tension as I tried to distract us from the pink elephant, and brunch came to $38 plus tip. I said I had to go home and do some organizing for the move, which was true: I’d been spectacularly unproductive all week. But what I really needed was to talk to Kathy.

    Kathy had been my friend for almost ten years. We’d met in a creative writing workshop in college at a time when we shared an unfortunate habit of writing in the second person (a side effect of reading too much Lorrie Moore). We were convinced we were naturals: we’d both won a slew of essay contests growing up, were extravagantly praised by teachers and family, and were generally acknowledged to be the best writers in our workshop. She loved my stories and I loved hers, with their gutsy protagonists and their even gutsier settings. She was addicted to travel magazines and confessed she’d never been anywhere she’d written about. I always suspected she was a bigger talent than I was, and I knew she was more driven, so it wasn’t surprising that she ended up being the one with the successful writing career. It was surprising that it was ghostwriting, since Kathy seemed like a novelist waiting to happen. She’d take a mean author photo: her explosion of black curly hair around her striking, pale face. She wasn’t pretty; she was formidable.

    After graduating college, Kathy took a proofreading job at a literary magazine while I took an office job, figuring I’d send out some stories to magazines and be promptly scooped up by the literary world. In the beginning, I did things like mail a story to the
New Yorker
with a scribbled cover letter: “Just thought you might like this.” By the end of the year, I was poring over every story published in
Seventeen
magazine and then creating a pastiche of their themes and styles, only to be rejected some more. Depressed and demoralized, I decided to travel for a while to clear my head. After that, I lived in a few different cities, tried out some jobs (none of them lasting more than a year), met some interesting people, drank too much, had relationships, and avoided thinking about how wildly unsuccessful I was.

    Until now.

    “You’ve reached the voice mailbox of Kathy Pecoe.