Life as an oyster shucker (repost from Twenties Unscripted)

This blog was originally published here, as part of Twenties Unscripted's Guest Writers Week on November 4, 2013. 

My manager sent out an email to the whole department, congratulating me on my miniature promotion. There was a picture of me atop a brief bio that painted me as a very serious bookworm, and apparently it didn’t look like me at all, according to a coworker. “I didn’t choose the picture,” I told my coworker, a cute girl with long, curly hair. “He grabbed it off my LinkedIn page.”

“LinkedIn?” she asked. “What’s that?”

It was supposed to be a part-time job. I was fresh off of a break-up with what I considered to be the epitome of soulless adulthood: a very junior IT position within a very powerful government agency. So, maybe I overcompensated for my occupational lack of whimsy when I copped this new gig: part-time cashier at my favorite natural foods grocery store. But I was starting a graduate program (more or less an act of panic) and getting SAT tutoring and catering event gigs on the side (both of which paid more hourly than my “real” government job, by the way). Three months, a full-time offer and one promotion later, I found myself in the most curious position. What is the appropriate balance between tending to the now and tending to the future? I enjoy my job – but how much effort do I devote to something not contributory to my eventual career? And who defines “eventual”—what timelines exist other than socially generated ones? Am I rebelling, aiming too low, or just taking advantage of the unmarked roadmap we affectionately refer to as “life”?

My gay childhood best friend is a raging and back-flipping alcoholic, the type of friend you’ll love forever but sometimes need a yearlong break from. Very recently, he was laid off from his “eh”-paying job, just months after securing his own one-bedroom apartment that cost more than half of what he earned monthly. He was forced to his limits, texting me for advice on selling his Macbook Pro and even requesting via a Facebook status that 50 friends donate to him 20 dollars each. Just before eviction, his cell phone lit up in glimmering gold with a job offer – one paying nearly double his previous income. And not long after, he texted my roommate (and our mutual friend) to ask, “Dana went from contract editor to working at a grocery store?” He told her that I was needlessly being a renegade, and that “at this age, it’s crucial to establish stability.” By the way, “this age,” for the both of us, is 24. We’re old enough to admonish our peers for not yet achieving as much as we have, but apparently too young to catch the irony in it all. The twenties are not an excuse to do poorly. It just so happens that lots of twenty-somethings do poorly, whether in terms of their careers, finances, or relationships. But “poorly” is a matter of opinion, and age ain’t nothing but a number (thank you, Aaliyah).

It is pointless to make comparisons. The only standards we should be striving for are those set by ourselves. I recently came across an essay I wrote for my introductory Philisophy class, which I took during my freshman year of college. “Finding the cure for cancer or otherwise ‘saving mankind’ is not the sole path to having meaning in one’s life, and is rarely the case anyway,” I wrote. “Shucking oysters every day and playing the guitar by fireside can have just the same, if not more meaning.” Apparently, I’ve been the way I am at least since I was 19, and probably long before.

These types of short essays sometimes feel farcical, as if it’s really possible to outline a huge, vague problem and a corresponding brilliant realization in 600 words.  I don’t have a solution. Today, I sent off two very important applications. Later this month, I’ll send off a third. If the responses I receive aren’t good, then I’ll wait for the right opportunity to go for something else. And in the meantime, I’ll be working 8 hours a day, 5 days a week at a very nice grocery store in a very nice part of Maryland, enjoying myself and the good fortune of being able to wear jeans to work.

I am Hannah Horvath: 'Girls' as reality TV

It is very rare that I sit and watch television, but like so many of my peers and innumerable critics, I love HBO’s Girls. Perhaps this is because Girls does not feel like television. Girls is about as close as you can get to watching the real world without watching The Real World (which, arguably, is even less real than Girls). The series begins with 24-year-old Hannah Horvath being financially dumped by her parents, and the rest is her shaky attempt at navigating professional and personal relationships as a responsible young adult. Watching Hannah careen into near-disaster every week has mounted my understanding that this is the offbeat girl next door struggling with a lot more than trying to keep her shorteralls from riding up in the middle.

It wasn’t until I read one article on Slate in which the author praises Girls creator Lena Dunham for daring to feature such an “unlikeable protagonist,” as Hannah is, that something clicked. I had never considered Hannah unlikeable –rude, awkward, inappropriate, selfish, immature, naïve – but never flat out unlikeable. Now with the understanding that Hannah is not meant to be liked (such as is the unintentional comic relief Shoshanna)—she joins the ranks of brutishly candid Jessa and idealistic, coldblooded Marnie, and it makes the series just that much better. It’s like now I have relinquished the part of me that ignored the shiver down my spine when Hannah does something like destroy a job interview with a date rape joke, or casually attack a fling’s political beliefs in response to negative feedback about an essay she’d written.

On a basic level, I have identified with Hannah in many ways. She is a writer, feeling things for the thrill of feeling them, going through life like some sort of self-appointed journalist guinea pig, ready to share the well-written details of every awkward tryst for even the possibility of some kind of artistic impact. She is a recent college graduate that has felt the burn of the unpaid internship. She’s dabbled in jobs she feels overqualified for, but still manages to somehow fuck them all up. She’s engaged in unhealthy relationships, both sexual and platonic. She is fucked up and often unwilling to acknowledge the ways in which she’s responsible for her situations. She is everything I hate to admit I am.

Growing up, there were no shows like Girls (and if there was, would I have even been interested?). Instead, I watched shows like Friends. While each character on Friends is carefully crafted into a “type” – Phoebe is quirky, Monica is anal, and Rachel is a recovering spoiled brat – Girls accomplishes the same while retaining realistic levels of flexibility, spontaneity, and complexity. Hannah’s uncertainty about life can be read as quirky and at other times flippant. She seems to quit jobs as a hobby, and has little concept of professionalism. Her self-assured verbal declarations may have sincere intentions but can come across nauseatingly privileged and solipsistic (“Maybe you are the bad friend and I’m the good friend,” “My problem is that I’m too kind, I’m too compassionate”). Hannah says the things we wouldn’t dare to, for common respect to social decency: after writing about Marnie’s agonizing relationship with Charlie in her notebook, which Charlie then read, leading to the two’s breakup, Hannah asks: “But did you like it? Just as a piece of writing.”

She is caustically cheeky about the most sensitive of subjects: the root of a nasty divorce, a lover’s political beliefs, a friend’s abortion. She is often a fool in her flings, like sending a raunchy picture in response to a sext that Adam said was not intended for her. She throws caution to the wind, including making blatantly bad decisions with a Venti cup of confidence—procuring coke for a writing assignment and having a titties-out romp with Elijah culminating in her sleeping with the junkie downstairs; telling her boss that he can fuck her, then attempting to extort and then threaten to sue him when he declines; chasing down a stranger from the coffee shop and kissing him after confessing she’s been throwing the shop’s garbage in his trash cans.

Hannah reminds me of myself in the ways I don’t want to be reminded. Although we are the same age, at 24, she resembles my 19-year-old self in philosophy and demeanor way more than I am comfortable admitting.

She quotes Fiona Apple in an episode, saying she just wants to feel everything –but in the process, she’s numbing herself to feeling anything. When brief fling Sandy says he loves hanging out with her, she goes on an annoying mini-rant about not wanting him to use the word “love” at all. Hannah is not unlike George Costanza, a character you love to be angry at, because she is simultaneously frustrating and hilarious. Lena Dunham has done a wonderful job of creating a character that speaks to parts of me I’d prefer to disown. I imagine it to be similar to how someone secretly interested in murder would feel watching Dexter – so wrong, but so, so right. Hannah Horvath represents the struggle between being an adventurous woman with HPV and an e-book deal, and having the stable income to afford rent each month. As she attempts to build the bridge that joins the two, we can join along on her journey, laughing (and sometimes pointing), pretending that her identity is less reflective of our own than it really is. 

The catfish gutted: Social media, virtual relationships and identity fraud

When his documentary Catfish was released in 2010, Nev Schulman was a 26-year-old, relatively unknown photographer from New York. Since the production of the movie’s television counterpart on MTV in 2012, he has become a sort of benevolent relative of To Catch A Predator’s Chris Hansen, busting not chat room pedophiles but instead, dishonest online daters.

Catfish the TV show is a half exposé, half humanitarian effort that feasts on the premise of physically uniting people who have, until that point, kept their romance confined to the Internet. In Catfish the documentary, Nev traveled to meet Megan, who he had been carrying on a relationship with solely via Facebook, phone calls, and text messages. Young, beautiful Megan proved to actually be a ruse identity for not-so-young, not-as-beautiful Angela. It was revealed that Angela assumed many online personas, utilizing Facebook sort of like The Sims. She gave life to Megan by creating elaborate storylines and friends for her to interact with on her Facebook wall. It was a complex web of lies that Nev found himself in, and his obvious solution was to capitalize on this newly identified phenomenon of “catfishing.”

According to UrbanDictionary, a catfish is "someone who pretends to be someone they're not using Facebook or other social media to create false identities." Nev claims to have created Catfish the TV show as a way for people in this uniquely 21st century situation to discover the truth—or perhaps, to shed their naïveté and move on to relationships with physical, tangible, verifiable people. The series begs the question: Does anyone ever truly have hope that his or her situation won’t have a result similar to Nev’s? Do these guys really believe they are in an online relationship with a gorgeous model that is too busy to meet up for one, two, or ten years, but strangely has no evidence of any modeling gigs? Are they actively ignoring what is blatantly fishy, or has the desperation for a connection rendered them oblivious to a barrage of crimson red flags?

"Alyx" and Kya, a rare Season One Catfish success story.

The TV show has so far aired ten episodes, only two of which have resulted in a tangible, offline relationship. The show is well-accomplished at enforcing the strength of an artificial connection and the comfort of delusion, having proven more times than not that honesty ruins whatever semblance of a relationship once shared in a world where lovers have no webcam, eternally poor cell phone service, and only six photos of themselves. When the all-American jock learns that he has been talking to a gay African-American man for over a year instead of “some super sexy farmer’s daughter,” the implied silver lining is the catfish’s awakening and acknowledgment of identity crisis, and the expected friendship that will blossom from newly planted soils of truth. However, it becomes quite apparent that any understanding or sympathy for the perpetrator is crushed under the weight of disappointment – the relationship was too good to be true, and it was indeed untrue. All the thoughts and feelings they believed to have expressed to someone they were physically attracted to, were actually fed to a person that is now tantamount to a trashcan – words and time wasted, never to be recouped. Frequently, the emotional or mental connection that has e-stimulated the catfishee for so long is thwarted into a fine dust once they realize they’ve been duped. There is very little way to forge meaningful relationships on fraudulent grounds – oh, unless the physical attraction is real, of course (as seen in the Rico and Jamari episode). And the physical attraction is quite often absent, or rather, one-sided in these situations. The catfish cites fear of rejection as justification for what they’ve done, usually to then be rejected.

The people who catfish seem to have a few things in common – according to the show, at least. They are confused about the space they occupy in the dating world, often struggling to come to grips with difficult sexual preferences or self-confidence—or both.

Collin* has been catfishing for about 10 years, since he was 14 – and has never seen either the movie or the show.

“I started in ninth grade,” he said. “My situation was that I [am] gay and was infatuated with a lot of my [straight male] friends, and the only way I could get the type of intimacy I wanted from them was to create this girl.”

Collin created a persona who used the name Janice, using either unknown girls’ photos taken from the Internet, or photos of one of his childhood friends. He contacted several dozen of his classmates under the guise of Janice over a span of years, and even went as far as speaking to and engaging in phone sex with some of them, changing his voice.

“I did it purely out of lust,” said Collin. “I would never go as far as to say ‘I love you’ or want a relationship with them. This is completely separate from my love life.”

Catfish hoax victim Manti Te'o.

Indeed, the Internet may at first appear to be a promising resource for those looking for a romantic connection: contact with virtually anyone is merely a click away.  With whom we are actually connecting is a separate and much bigger issue. Notre Dame football player Manti Te’o was recently the victim of a catfish hoax, believing he was dating a woman named Lennay Kekua, who actually was a persona created and operated by a man claiming to have been in love with him, Ronaiah Tuisosopo.

“The Te’o thing is hard to grasp,” Collin said. “How can you be in love with somebody and they think you’re someone else? How do you process someone loving you, when it’s not you that they love?”

The psychology behind catfishing appears complex, but in a large part fueled by confusion and some brand of self-doubt. This is an obvious observation, reiterated by the comment most frequently spewed by catfishers upon first meeting their catfishee: “I was scared to tell the truth, I thought you might stop talking to me.” For most people, pixels will never adequately replace a person, so it is not farfetched to surmise that this population of online-only daters has something to hide, whether it be an element of their identity or their entire selves altogether. The contemporary nature of social interaction allows for such concealment—catfishing could not have been possible before the boom of the Internet. On the other hand, growing online presence—more people on more platforms—make it increasingly difficult to successfully carry out a catfishing operation. Collin recalls being caught in his scheme when he was chatting with someone who found the pictures he sent, online on its actual profile. On the TV show, simple Google image searches often reveal that the pictures of the supposed love interest actually belong to someone else. From that point forth, it is at best naïve to believe that the rest of the story unfolds like a fairy tale.

Collin believes that online dating and communication in general can be very shady in nature, and believes the fault lies in the person that willingly talks to a stranger and raises no suspicion. For him, the best defense is common sense.

“I don’t know why you would continue talking to someone you’ve never seen, someone who always has an excuse for why they can’t chat with you on a webcam,” Collin said. “I personally don’t think I would ever fall for something like that.”

*Name has been changed.

A beginner's quasi-Christian response to the Bible

"All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible."

 - George Santayana 

"You've gotta take this thing with a grain of salt, buddy, come on." 

- Reverend Lovejoy on the bible, The Simpsons

I’ve never considered myself religious. I’ve managed to avoid actually reading the Bible for all of my 23 years, perhaps because I’ve been intimidated by the reputation that precedes it. It toted a sort of Pandora’s box-like quality that I simply sidestepped until a few weeks ago, when out of sheer curiosity an organic interest was born in me. In some way, religious or secular, personally or academically, I knew I would be a disadvantaged bibliophile if I continued to judge this revered book by its bland, monochromatic cover. So, like planet Earth, I started with Genesis.

While a 2011 Gallup survey reports that a whopping 30 per cent of U.S. adults interpret the Bible literally, I am siding with the majority. After all, subjugation of women, religious intolerance, incest, slavery, and capital punishment are all societal woes that are justified in the Bible. Just how seriously can we treat questionable biblical guidance while retaining practicality and sanity? 

Certainly, God would not want us to kill two turtledoves every time we sinned. Are there even enough turtledoves alive to accommodate that? And surely God would not literally want us to cut off the hand that we’ve used to sin—we’d be a legion of amputees. We widely ignore specific counsel regarding premarital sex (1 Thessalonians 4:3-5), ejaculation (Genesis 38:9), divorce (Matthew 19:6), and finances (1 Corinthians 16:2). If some things in the Bible can be so casually and commonly overlooked, how can other things be so fiercely guarded and debated?

God said that it was an abomination for a man to lie with another man (Leviticus 20:13)—and this has spiraled into a culture of institutionalized homophobia. God told us to give 10 per cent of our income to the church (Leviticus 27:30)—and now we have churches with billboards and commercials, the pastor wearing a mic like Britney Spears’, and toting a salary that rivals hers. God told us to be fruitful and multiply (Genesis 9:7), and now we have blanketed the Earth with our presence, much to its detriment. Would it not be wise to treat all people as equals, tithe directly to charities and those we wish to help, and assign more focus towards cherishing and preserving the earth we have been multiplying upon?

Throughout my reading, one question plagued my mind worse than frogs or locusts: Why is it that we are so afraid to admit that we do not know something? We would rather create answers with gaping inconsistencies than to conclude we do not and cannot know, because to admit that is to introduce the possibility that nothing is real. Nothing exists the way we believe it does, so why should the truth, whatever that may be, mirror our hypotheses? Why should the reality of what will become of us be within the spectrum of our abilities to understand and comprehend life and death?

I don’t know if I became a journalist because I am skeptical, or if I am skeptical because I am a journalist. I constantly find myself questioning articles that I read from even the most “reputable” sources. My general skepticism has certainly prevented the progression of any personal relationship I might have with religion, or more specifically, Christianity. A compilation of tales written by ancient strangers, who certainly were much different than I in language, lifestyle, and frame of intelligence, won’t win my trust with just the shake of a shekel.

I do not believe circumcision is a prerequisite for holiness. I do not believe God “hates fags,” as religious picketers tend to boast. I do not believe the Israelites are the favored people of Earth. I find that unjust and unlike a God that is purported to love everyone equally. In fact, in 1999, Tel Aviv University archaeologist Ze’ev Herzog said in an article in the Ha’aretz newspaper that “the Israelites were never in Egypt, did not wander in the desert, did not conquer the land in a military campaign and did not pass it on to the 12 tribes of Israel.” Furthermore, Herzog asserts that “the united monarchy of David and Solomon, which is described by the Bible as a regional power, was at most a small tribal kingdom.”

Though Herzog’s statements remain controversial, they are a quintessential representation of the intent of biblical archaeology: to sift the true apart from the false. The basis for so much conflict that bleeds into the history we are today writing is mythical. As we forge battles on archaic beliefs, we curtail the opportunities for internal progression and ultimately, peace. Though we pick and choose biblical logic to support our moral standpoints, there will almost always be other biblical content to the contrary. Therefore, perhaps the situation is akin to lawyers arguing a complicated legal case. No one is wrong, no one is right, but the implications are widespread enough to affect us all. The challenge is utilizing the contents of the Bible as a tool and not a weapon.

No one can deny that there is more to life than we know. There is more to everything that we see, that we feel, that we shallowly surmise based on this book or that experience or this friend or that teacher. Our existence is entirely our own, and it only makes sense that many would feel motivated to invite in a higher power, a source of hope, a way to justify our existence as something more than a blip in the universe. I look out into the galaxy and feel compounded by the weight of all of which I do not know, which no one knows, and no one may ever know. You cannot convince someone to relinquish their faith, because to their faith they are indeed faithful. I just only hope for this faith to culminate in positive and progressive ways, and not revert to archaic ideologies of intolerance and hateful violence.

Everyone who believes anything that cannot be proven is doing so for their own reasons, all of which may differ from one another. Some believe to be protected, some believe because they have been bred into believers. Some believe because they genuinely believe, and others believe because they’ve never given a second thought to what it is they actually believe and why. The strongest argument I have heard for being a “person of faith” is that believing gives you nothing to lose and everything to gain, while disbelieving gives you everything to lose and nothing to gain.

However, I am more impressed with the contemplative than the assured, whether that’s assurance in theism or its opposite. Life is a journey with no finite answers, no technical guidebook to steer you—though I’m sure the Bible was the biggest and most successful attempt. The ability to have an open mind and genuinely consider the possibility of different truths and realities is paramount to progression as a person. It might not secure your admission into those pearly gates, if you believe a Heaven exists, but at least on Earth your aura will shine bright in a secular light.