I'm Only Here for the WiFi

© 2013 by Chelsea Fagan

Published by Running Press,

A Member of the Perseus Books Group

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2013934595

E-book ISBN 978-0-7624-5062-6

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Digit on the right indicates the number of this printing

Cover and interior design by Amanda Richmond

Edited by Jordana Tusman

Typography: Governor, Gotham, and Archer

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A COMPLETE GUIDE TO

RELUCTANT ADULTHOOD

CHELSEA FAGAN

RUNNING PRESS

PHILADELPHIA • LONDON

To Isabella,

for whenever you think you want to give up. Just remember: Legal alcohol is right around the corner, and it exceeds your wildest dreams.

INTRODUCTION

Chapter 1

THE MORNING

Or, How Hard You Can Throw the Alarm Clock Before It Will Break

Chapter 2

FINDING AND KEEPING A JOB

Or, How to Make a Résumé the Right Mix of Lies and Actual Work Experience

Chapter 3

HOBBIES

Or, How to Find Things to Do That Don't Depend Entirely on Drinking

Chapter 4

GOING OUT

Or, How to Justify a $12 Cocktail by Screaming “This Is My Song!”

Chapter 5

LOVE AND DATING

Or, How to Appease Your Mother When She Asks If You're Seeing Anyone

Chapter 6

FINANCES

Or, How to Finish the Month Without Crying into Your Ramen

Chapter 7

FRIENDSHIP

Or, How to Find Cool People Who Aren't the Same Five Coworkers

Chapter 8

GROWING UP

Or, Making the World a Better Place by Doing Something Other Than Suckling from Society's Ravaged Teat

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

W
alk into a coffee shop this Wednesday afternoon.
What would you expect to see? After all, it's the time of the week when most people should be attending to whatever activity they've chosen to contribute to society—leisure time, as we were raised to understand it, is usually relegated to evenings and weekends. And yet, as if the whole world has just stopped turning and the laws of economics have ceased to apply, the coffee shop will be filled with young, able-bodied humans. Physically adept, intellectually curious, they have all coalesced to nibble on the same stale muffin for four hours and do all but build a makeshift shelter at the back table by the bathroom. With almost no regard to the idea that WiFi, as well as table space itself, costs money, the entire entity of a coffee shop has been usurped by people determined to linger over the same cup of drip coffee for an entire afternoon. Tapping away on $1,500 computers, you'll see a whole branch of society hard at work doing, well, whatever it is they do.

And what is that, exactly? It could be any number of things. Sure, there will be the vacant horde who have long since given up on their dreams and have resigned themselves to aimless Facebook cruising. There will be the networkers, updating their Twitter and LinkedIn profiles (just kidding—LinkedIn is for people who have to go to offices), making those powerful social connections. There will be freelancers, whose incomes range from “whatever
my parents put on the card this month” to “secret billionaire,” but those are deceptively hard to spot in a crowd. What is sure, though, is that this is where they are safe. This is where they won't be judged, save for the occasional hateful glance from the guy picking up the empty cups and resenting the fact that somehow he got stuck having to work an actual job.

We've all read endless articles and studies about how monumentally directionless our young people are, in everything from
The New York Times
to
Slate,
and while it's so easy to turn up your nose and tell us to indiscriminately “get a life,” it's not hard to see why the situation is so bleak. Since we were old enough to know the sweet, sweet ecstasy of a gold star on a sheet of paper, we've been told to go to college. We've been told to dream big, because there is nothing we couldn't do. We've been told to pursue any- and everything, from ballerina to astronaut to teacher to doctor, and promised that with enough vigor and tuition, we'd achieve it. Several years and trillions of dollars of student debt later, we've realized that it's just not like that. We've moved grudgingly back into our parents' basements, or in hopeful flocks toward the Great Cities on the hill—Portland, New York, Philly, D.C., L.A.—to continue to pursue a dream, only this time with well over $1,000-a-month rents and jobs we always haughtily imagined would be beneath us at twenty-three. Reality is repeatedly splashing us in the face with ever-colder water, and our preconceived notions about everything have turned out to be, at best, wrong, and, at worst, incredibly expensive.

Those of us who moved to cities, though, have the added bonus of being surrounded by those who did “make it” in whatever sense we've long imagined that to be. Somehow affording an extravagant wedding at twenty-five, working a respectable position at a high-powered PR firm (who even believed those still existed?), or living in an apartment that seems too well-decorated to belong to someone who still does beer bongs—these are all proof that it's possible. We come across people who walk around with all this “money” we've heard so much about, with places to go and a reason to look down on those who've been left behind. You don't know the true existential cruelty of the social hierarchy until you've been forced to go to a brunch with twenty-two-year-olds who make $55K a year doing something they love. People who, a few mere months ago, may have been your close friends, now see you as something to be pitied, to be studied—a cautionary tale. “Oh, what are you doing? That sounds . . . fun.” No, it doesn't. Working days at the Gap and nights babysitting does not sound fun to anyone, and your condescending lies aren't canceling out your Marc Jacobs purse. We get it: Some people are more successful than others, and now, more than ever, that makes the special ones even more special.

Navigating just a single day as a young urban human being—whether professional or whatever the politically correct antithesis of that is—is an exercise in adaptation. We've learned to be entitled, to be fragile, and, yet, to be hopeful. All these things, in varying measure, prove to be in need of an extremely large grain of
salt. Sure, great things can happen, but they likely take time. Yes, you should want success, but you may want to be flexible on the definition. Sure, emotions are necessary, but they cannot dictate your entire life. And if we don't learn to accept these truths and adjust our lives accordingly, we could end up like so many of our fallen comrades, spending days on end at the coffee shop, inciting the ire of every barista to ever glare at us over the pastry case.

But from waking up in the morning, to slogging through public transportation (in all its urine-soaked forms), to putting in hours wherever we've chosen to put them, all the way down to deciding between a yardstick of shots with someone you just met waiting in line for the bathroom or going to bed at 9:00 p.m. like an adult—it's all so much. We were promised that life was going to be riding around on a unicorn in a business suit, collecting gold coins, and moving into apartments that are less and less dependent on IKEA. We were promised the world.

It seems as though everyone lied to us. If you watched
Sex and the City,
you imagined that even if you look like Sarah Jessica Parker and have a personality akin to taking a cheese grater to the back of the calves, men will still fawn all over you. You will have your pick of the litter, and can go through dates, suitors, and engagements like a carousel that you only step off once every week or so to get drunk and go on a shopping spree with girl-friends. If you listened to college brochures and advisors, you imagined a long line of men and women in business suits waiting
for you outside of college graduation wearing a name tag that says
boss,
and gleefully handing you a contract where you get paid $50K a year to gchat and have three-martini lunch meetings. If you listened to well-meaning relatives, you imagined that owning a house and settling down by the age of twenty-seven was not only what was expected, it was also going to be that magical line of painter's tape across your life that designated the shift from “child” to “adult.” I think we can safely say that none of these things are realistic, and most are dangerous to believe in. To not feel like a disappointment in at least one category is to either be kidding yourself or to be too insufferable and perfect to even speak to. For your sake, I hope it's the former.