Life After College: Yawn

Working in the real world is harder than I ever thought. I remember older friends telling me that they would come home exhausted and barely have the energy to pull together a dinner sandwich. But I blew them off and just assumed that for some reason their jobs involved intensive physical labor that made them so tired. And since I was never on the construction job track I figured that I would end my days full of energy and zest.

By Jenni

Turns out I was wrong. I’m so dead by the end of the day that I can barely keep my eyes open when I crawl into bed at sunset. Truth be told, I cannot figure out why. I possibly have the least physically demanding job in the entire world. As a freelance blogger I spend half my days in bed on the computer and half my days on a couch on the computer. Sure my fingers are getting a work-out (ever seen a thumb with biceps?) but the rest of me might as well be sold off for spare parts. If anyone knows how much legs (partially shaved) are going for these days, please leave me a message below.

And it’s not only the exhaustion that’s taking a toll on me. It’s also being responsible for the work that I do everyday. In the past I’ve had part time jobs doing things like working at an ice cream store. But if I didn’t bring my A-game to work it wasn’t that big of a deal. All it meant was that some kid had an allergic reaction because I wasn’t paying attention when his mother asked if nuttybutter-walnut ice cream had nuts in it. Same with internships. I could make a million mistakes and then shrug my shoulders and be like “sorry, I’m just an intern, I didn’t know that pressing backspace would delete a year’s worth of work.”

But now it’s like I make a mistake and I receive a scathing e-mail seconds later asking me if I was raised speaking English or if it’s a recently acquired skill. When people are paying you real money for your work, they’re a lot more demanding–as well as open with the constructive criticism. If I had a penny for every e-mail from an editor telling me to change this or be wittier or be more serious or write all your words backwards for style effect, I might be able to afford to eat three meals a day.

Unfortunately for my stomach no one is attaching pennies to e-mails these days. Until then I’ll keep on chuggin’ along trying to keep my eyes open long enough to catch the 5:00 news. And by news I mean Family Matters reruns.