Time and Observations.

Every day I wake up and take a bus to my job as a waitress. At work, most of my co-servers are single - as I am - but already parents with babymamadrama. I think to myself; okay, Americorps was a good idea, but we should have a mandatory minimum wage law where everyone has to spend a year earning only minimum wage. It's hard to watch how my peers have to struggle. It's not like the Philippines where starvation and homelessness is an actual reality to avoid, but there is the same bleak future and general sort of stagnation - they work hard to run nowhere, the money drains away into pools of ridiculousness. The rent money. The baby daddy doesn't pay up. Lawyers to make him pay up. Food. Kid is sick. Roommate moved out and have to carry the lease alone. Drugs, drugs, and more drugs. Classes at the community college or online. Bail and probation fees.

On the other hand, I am meeting - through friends of friends - a far more successful sect of my peers. Some are in law school, others are going to school, others already have security clearances and work for the government. For them, they are already on a moving walkway towards Life Figured Out. They have apartments, pay bills easily and go out several times a week to bars on the Hill in order to network, network, network. This is the life I was born into, my parents worked hard to make it easy for me to get in. I have a nice home in Bethesda, an education and all the potential towards a future career that I could ask for. The boulder is at the top of the hill - I just have to give it a little push.

Yesterday I had an interview with the State Department. I don't know if I got the job, I don't know if I want the job. Everyday I think about traveling, and every day I think about this guy I met in Thailand. We were at a bar on the beach that specializes in Happy Shakes (I admit to nothing) and he was sleeping on a bench by the bathroom. He'd been lying there undisturbed since the night before.

When he woke up and started chatting with us, a conversation that began with bumming a cigarette off of my friend, we learned that he was Italian, that he had just broken up with his girlfriend, that he hadn't had a cell phone for years and that he was broke with no place to stay. He wasn't trying to get anything out of us - he didn't want a place to stay. He didn't want a cell phone. He seemed very happy, even without sampling the bar's specialties.

Of course, I am not trying to become an Italian hippie. Obviously I know that his lifestyle was not sustainable in the long term, but he was just one of many-a-traveler who worked when money was needed and didn't work when it wasn't. It seems so simple... my parents large Bethesda home, which requires constant upkeep, blows my mind on a daily basis. We have dozens of cleaning products for variations of the same thing. But, and this I know, we are not abnormal. The television advertises more more more more more for homes just like ours and American families of the middle-to-upper class persuasion, just like ours. My parents work all the time, my brother has joined their ranks, and my mother can't fathom why in the mornings I enjoy doing nothing but sitting and doing puzzles for an hour in the mornings - it's not productive. An ad on TV announces a new version of internet that allows you to "get things done" when you would otherwise be wasting time. The example uses a mother waiting for her kid to get out of school so that she can drive her home. The filling of time, all the time, meant to make life more simple and productive seems to me to be simply complicated. More than complicated; unnatural.

This is what I think about in my hour-long puzzle time every morning; I puzzle over where I stand in life, whether what I see is part of being American, part of having a family, or both. I don't feel a connection to it and I doubt I ever will, but my parents maintain that America is the greatest country in the world and, let me tell you, in my twenty-five years of experience they have usually been right... about everything.

It's hard to watch the widening financial and social gap in my peers. This is part of growing up, no doubt. We are no longer the dependents of our parent's financial positions but have, for the last few years, been figuring out our own place in the economic food chain. I've missed the beginning stages of this process by choosing to go abroad and dig my own small dent in the world, but being home has made daily life an onslaught of realizations followed by niggling questions.

Where do I stand in all of this?