lore drop

memoir lite®

I.

My first arbitrage was flipping decorative erasers I bulk-purchased in Southeast Asia to my fellow East Bay elementary schoolers for a premium. Fifty cents got you a cute transparent eraser with a smiling animal suspended in its center; a dollar, sweet-scented stretchy putty that was advertised to remove graphite but whose true calling was ending up hard-stuck to the inner recesses of classroom desks. For customers who could not pay in legal tender, I tolerated barter, trading my wares for whole wheat honey buns and “Cry Babies” (sour cherry shaved ice) that could be purchased with pre-loaded cafeteria dollars. I eventually got busted — my makeshift marketplace was distracting kids from state-approved arithmetic — but not before I developed a real penchant for making a quick, easy buck. When I look back on my gig work in the years since — catering wine country weddings in addition to my full-time job, semi-legal hawking of homemade financiers, 2.5 years of writing SEO-optimized recipes for a salary that amounted to less than minimum wage after foreign taxes — I realize it was never really about the money (which I’ve always been mediocre at finding good uses for), but about the reward of seeing and seizing opportunity and experience where others can’t or won’t. More on that later.

II.

Most of my friends know that I lived and worked in Japan as an English teacher for a couple of years. Fewer of them know that one of the three high schools I taught at was basically a real-life sports anime. I was an instructor at a dormitory school for the nation’s top velodrome cyclists, which meant that 70 or so kids, hand-picked from across the country for their unusual excellence in careening around a track slanted at 36.3° at a casual 50 mph, were sent to rural Kagoshima to train as professional athletes, occasionally sustain horrific road rash, and even more occasionally learn some English from me. Japan has notoriously poor language education, despite its notoriously strong everything else, so only one of my pupils was an academic standout. When he passed EIKEN Grade 1 (the highest-proficiency English test, akin to a grad school-level TOEFL score or the inverse of JLPT N1) as a first-year student, we were interviewed for the local news. My student was charming and eloquent; I made a mediocre joke about the declining value of the yen that still makes me cringe.

III.

I have reason to believe that, following the passage of California’s 2020 accessory dwelling unit (ADU) reform bills, my work at a leading housing start-up briefly put me in the national top 10 for most ADUs permitted. If I had more motivation, I would collect the data to BOTEC this out properly, but I cannot be bothered. That exact unwillingness to hash out numerical details is why I no longer work in permitting.

IV.

I wrote and directed short plays in high school. Seeing my stories on stage did insane things for my self-confidence, and I’m pretty sure I’m still riding that high to this day. I’m romantic about words because they pay my bills and fan my ego, and my affection really started at a summer camp hosted at the dusty estate of long-dead American playwright Eugene O’Neill, where people encouraged me to sprawl out on the dry grass, pen family dramas, and begin to nurse a lifelong delusion that I have something important to say.

V.

I don’t feel at liberty to claim any intelligence because I graduated from a mid-tier state school and never progressed beyond pre-calculus, but I’m trying my best to overcome this insecurity and admit that I can play certain games well. For example, at that mid-tier state school, I graduated first in my major, summa cum laude, with distinction, as an honors student, in 2.5 years — 1.5 years ahead of schedule. I worked two part-time jobs at once (three, actually, for a few short weeks), received full scholarships for two study abroad programs, and still managed to make time to join a sorority, fulfill the demands of respectability politics, and emotionally terrorize my boyfriend.

This, while not globally impressive, took great effort, and I want to own that I’m proud of how hard I worked and proud of the legible outputs that hard work produced. Reflecting on my time in college is a good reminder that I am capable of extreme determination and hardiness when I need to be, and I’m grateful that past me took it upon herself to make that known.

VI.

Shortly after becoming a freshly minted adult, I got the bright idea that rather than going Dutch on dinner dates with vape-smoking, rainbow keyboard-owning enrollees of the SDSU Fowler College of Business, I should attempt to date upward — in both tax bracket and age. Due to my astute observation of Pornhub categories and brazen disregard for personal safety, I possessed both the knowledge that being “barely legal” was a selling point and the requisite recklessness to capitalize on it. Thus ensued a particularly hectic (and equally meaningful and formative) time in my life.

There are plenty of stories to share, and maybe one day, after AGI has negated the need for human labor (and thus, employability), I’ll divulge in full. But for now, here is a brief outline of a single excursion.

Man picks me up for an overnight in Beverly Hills. I am swept up and alarmed by my sudden plunge into high culture. We listen to strange instrumentals in the car, which is discernibly fancy, though I lack the sensitivity to explain exactly how. We go out for Easter brunch, where I eat less than I want to appear demure and shake hands with a celebrity chef while wearing items from the Forever 21 sale rack. Man suggests swimming, but I didn’t bring a swimsuit, so we pop into a store for him to buy me one. He asks if I want to do more shopping, which I decline in a show of modesty and consideration, but I’ve misunderstood — wanting is a demonstration of taste, and fulfilling wants is a demonstration of masculinity. We swim. We go to another restaurant, where we eat small, decorative food off small, decorative plates, which sort of matches how I feel. I try my best to add value to the conversation, though it’s hard because I have not lived very long. Man is very nice to me anyway.

Through experiences like this, I learn raw facts about the world: Pitchfork is a music publication known for its album reviews; “modern” refers to art from the 1860s–1970s, whereas “contemporary” means everything after; there’s no personal income tax in Abu Dhabi. I also learn about the human condition. Everyone, no matter how big or how broken, wants the same things: to feel smart, to feel safe, and to feel loved.

I have since abandoned pursuits of this nature, though I still regard practitioners of the lifestyle with the highest respect, and perhaps a little envy. At the conclusion of this particular outing, I was deposited in front of my freshman dorm in a vintage Cadillac by a Spanish-speaking chauffeur who politely addressed me as “Ms. Last Name of My Date,” but hit on me nonetheless. I would have liked to rush inside for a quick shower and primp, but I didn’t have time — I was late for my 10 AM, which I rocked up to with Rita Ora’s “Big” blasting in my ears and a band of crisp bills burning a hole in my pocket.

VII.

After years of waffling, I took a small step forward in besting my capitalistic tendencies by signing Giving What We Can’s 10% pledge, a commitment to donate 10% of my income to highly effective charities until I retire. In the end, the thing that pushed me over the edge was holding a Lesley Stowe Raincoast Crisp® up to the window while tripping on psychedelics, weeping at the sunshine pouring through the mosaicked fruits, nuts, and seeds, and feeling enormously guilty for tearing through such overt luxury without a second thought. I looked around me and saw villains: millionaires, or soon-to-be, with no regard for people outside their circle; race science entertainers who asked me to look at IQ bell curves and internalize their assumptions; social climbers so steeped in normative ideas of worth that their conception of selflessness failed to extend beyond not asking a friend to Venmo back — and realized I was falling victim to the same insidious, self-superior, myopic greed. I felt disgusted by my rapacity and dispirited by my cowardice. I felt overwhelmingly touched by the inconceivable abundance of my daily life.

When I ate the crisp, I knew something in me had crossed over. Though it was several more months before I signed, I eventually did with relatively little fanfare. The “I’m motivated to take this pledge today...” question on the sign-up flow, which had previously scared me with the grandiosity of its premise and presumption of being a long answer field, I answered simply: I love this world and its people. I want us to be well. What a gift to contribute toward that goal.

After signing, I cried softly in my $1,200 HÅG Capisco office chair. At one in the morning, I texted my friend “i signed the pledge :)” to which he replied “BEAST MODE.”