The $124,421 Man
On acquiring and paying off a six-figure student debt load:
The amount of money my parents and I were loaned was actually higher than $116,499—$124,141, to be exact—but my parents had been making monthly payments for years, whittling thousands off. In the end, we had decided to take loans out for seven semesters—all but my semester abroad, which my parents paid for out of pocket. (Turns out, it was several thousand dollars cheaper than a semester at Tufts.) Encouraged by low interest rates until senior year’s 6.5 percent, my father decided to pile on the loans, nearly all under his name.
How Much My Novel Cost Me
Writer Emily Gould on writing books, going into debt and navigating relationships. An excerpt from MFA VS NYC: The Two Cultures of American Fiction:
It was more like the failure occurred in tiny increments over the course of two years, after which it was too late to develop a solid Plan B.
I spent some of the advance on clothes that no longer fit my body/life, but mostly I spent it on taxes—New York even has a city tax, on top of the state and federal kind—and rent. I lived alone for three years in Brooklyn, paying $1,700 a month ($61,200 all told) for a pretty but small one-bedroom within eyeshot of the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway. I also spent $400 a month on health insurance. At one point I thought I would find another full-time job after finishing the book, but then I must have convinced myself that teaching yoga part time would better enable my writing. I also thought that I would immediately start another book, which I would sell, like the first, before I’d written half of it. In order to believe this I had to cut myself off from all kinds of practical realities; considering these realities seemed like planning for failure. In retrospect it seems clear that I should never have bought health insurance, nor lived by myself.
A Shit Writing Day
All of a writer’s fears, in one place. Ford reflects on writing out of a hole, and what keeps him from “going full-bore bananacakes” with his work:
“I have dug a number of limbic trenches, mental pathways that lead to stress and anxiety. I have a mixed (but steadily improving) record on substances, especially food. And if I allow the book and my writing to become a proxy for myself, as a sort of external version of my identity, I’m in trouble. But if I let these things be products, if I let them exist outside of me, don’t worry how people react to them, just let what wants to happen, happen—well, then I stand a chance of doing good work, without having to disgorge that work from myself seppuku-style using a rusty sword with a hilt of guilt and a dull blade forged from procrastination. That is, I need to make writing something besides a daily referendum on my worth as a human. Which it has become, for reasons.”
I Was Not a Pretty Child
Remembering what it was like to be ignored or mocked—and now, sometimes, being guilty of the same behavior:
“Female friendships are more complicated. There are nuances and there’s competition and there are magazines and men in bars who talk to your friend and not to you. You cannot take everything at face value. Hyper-analysis is the norm. I’m okay at making female friends. I love other women; they share their shoes. When you have conversations with women about sex, they almost never assume that you want to sleep with them. They drink wine and smell better than boys. I am not intelligent enough to put into words the intricacies of female friendships; there’s a physical intimacy, an immediate want toward sisterhood and trust. That’s how you can tell your friends from your acquaintances. With that openness and trust comes vulnerability, and with vulnerability comes conflict.”
Microaggression and Management
A short essay/instructional guide on how managers can use “microaggressions” against their team “to reinforce destructive power dynamics, justify inequality in the workplace, submerge conflict, construct false superiority/entitlement and maintain control over employees”:
“Commonly, there is a huge inequality in the accountability that employees have to managers vs. the accountability managers have to employees. There is a similar gulf in the relative degree of visibility that transacts between the parties. These gaps in visibility and accountability create an uneven ground for interaction — constructing a context that is simultaneously parental, patronizing, surveilling and discomforting.”
What the Hell Are You Doing?!
Tess Vigeland spent 11 years at her dream job at Marketplace. And then she decided to leave for an uncertain future:
“You guys — I had fans. Yeah. I had fans. People who would recognize me in elevators just by my voice. Perfect strangers who thought I was awesome and had the coolest job in the world. Who doesn’t love that?!
“And after 11 years of that… 11 years at Marketplace… I walked away.
“What. The Hell. Are you doing.”
Kodak’s Problem Child
A trip to Rochester, New York, to investigate the decisions that doom a company:
“Peter Sucy, another computer engineer at Kodak, describes the rarity of computers in the workplace in the late 1980s. ‘Almost no one had a computer at their desk,’ he recalls. When the Macintosh II was announced, packed with new state-of-the-art features, he had to buy one himself. With a $3,000 price tag, it allowed him to do things with images he could not do before, including digital photo editing. Based on those exhilarating experiences, he began making proposals for products that could expand Kodak’s reach in digital platforms.”
Close to the Machine (Excerpt)
The first chapter from Ellen Ullman’s 1997 book—a reflection on the life of a programmer:
“Joel and I started this round of debugging on Friday morning. Sometime later, maybe Friday night, another programmer, Danny, came to work. I suppose it must be Sunday by now because it’s been a while since we’ve seen my client’s employees around the office. Along the way, at odd times of day or night that have completely escaped us, we’ve ordered in three meals of Chinese food, eaten six large pizzas, consumed several beers, had innumerable bottles of fizzy water, and finished two entire bottles of wine. It has occurred to me that if people really knew how software got written, I’m not sure if they’d give their money to a bank or get on an airplane ever again.”