So here I am sitting in the most hipster coffee shop I could find sipping on a $5 tiny latte (am I in Australia or NYC?) after waking up with a case of writers itch after two weeks of not posting.
My way-too-expensive latte and I are staring blankly at the wall in front of us as nearby hipsters fiercely type away at their computers, which further reminds me and my latte that there is a blank screen in front of us. My latte and I are a collective because it is the latte's job to caffeinate me to productivity.
I thought being surrounded by eclectic individuals on top of the latte would totally spiral me into a whirlpool of even more creative ideas and cool writing. However, my latte is now gone, and that $5 just bought me about a sentence of caffeinated inspiration. Creativity doesn't come cheap, and being surrounded by eclectic individuals apparently doesn't influence my deep-thinking abilities.
So instead of trying to think of something interesting to write about, I will proceed by dissecting why I am suffering from a sudden lack of creative flow.
First, I just realized that I am under the impression that I am sitting here surrounded by the next generation of Agatha Christies and Dan Browns. Lana del Rey is playing in the background, and the tattoos, skinny jeans with flannels, and look of permanent angst sketched onto these people's faces are enough to convince little old me from North Carolina that there is enough depth beneath those wonderlust eyes to write 600 page novels introducing entire new ways of thinking to the rest of us shallow-minded individuals.
Mistake number one- these are most likely all normal individuals, many of
whom are probably less intelligent than I am ( I mean c'mon, I consider
myself a modern-day Shakespeare given that I make up words on the reg).
Statistically, they cannot all be the next prolific author of our time, so I shouldn't let a tattoo of a Japanese symbol convince me otherwise.
Which leads me to my next realization that my life has been a long and awkward battle of "I feel like I'm kind of alternative and like to do artsy things, but I also enjoy the sorostitute life." I can't seem to commit to either side of the spectrum, so here I am surrounded by real-life alternatives who in NYC are actually kind of the normal people, and its like an identity explosion. I'm here. I wear hipster glasses sometimes. But can we go clubbing?
I'm 21 and having this internal battle, which makes it okay, but I must admit I see myself having a similar anxiety attack in a similar coffee shop 20 years from now. Unless I move to Europe or Australia, which in my mind will solidify the fact that I'm kind of out there.
Next, I realized that a majority of my time here has been spent at my internship, which due to stringent confidentiality agreements, I am not really allowed to write about.
I mean do you know how stressful that is?!
I'm definitely one of those people who can keep a secret relatively safe. Person A tells me they did this behind Person B's back, and I'll always tell a Person C who is usually either my brother or my mom. I don't feel guilty divulging your secrets to someone completely unrelated, but when it comes to keeping my own secrets, I may as well tweet my every thought and feeling to my 200 followers on twitter because my mouth cannot be controlled. I immensely enjoy making jokes at my own expense, which usually entails me divulging my day to day doings.
So the fact that I cannot write about the trials and tribulations of interning at NBC is absolutely painstaking. I made an absolute FOOL of myself in front of a celebrity the other day, and I can't even publicly make fun of myself!
The stupid things that I do seem to involuntarily tumble out of my mouth, so the fact that I really can't talk about any of my dumb intern moments makes speaking at all extremely stressful. Divulge too much, and I could hypothetically get fired. So I usually don't answer questions anymore without a ten second "will I get fired for answering this" pause.
The worst is when people ask me what my internship is like. I had to
enstate a 30-minute "really think about what you can and cannot say
before answering this text" rule when I was talking to someone with
60,000+ followers on twitter the other day who was also very interested
in my internship. How do you say to someone making small talk " I want
to talk to you but if you ask me one more thing about this internship I
will probably need an entire bottle of Xanax to calm my nerves because
breath one word of even the good things I'm saying
to any of the also-influential people around you and I could definitely
get fired."
Another thing that contributes to my anxiety is that I'm not entirely sure what specifically I can and cannot say. For example, it's been made clear that I am allowed to tell you I got coffee as long as I don't tell you who it is for and what they ordered. It's like being in the mafia or something except the kind of secrets I am keeping are the ones no one actually cares about.
When someone texts me and asks me what are you up to? and I answer something like "can't tell you, what about you?" I suddenly turn into one of the most pretentious individuals I've ever met. It's one thing to be pretentious with good reason (like you're in the CIA and can't be like hey babe, about to kill an undercover Syrian spy, what are you up to?). It's another thing to be a lowly intern and act like you're too good to tell people you are buying someone a sandwich. But I really can't!
So all of this being said, it has been a very strained existence for someone with a filter that is uh, lacking. And this also excuses me from the fact that there was no real topic to this blog post at all other than the fact that I couldn't really think of something real to write about because my latte from the hipster cafe didn't really do it's job.
So until next time.
-F
No comments:
Post a Comment