Pissborg

It’s important that I write this, so that I can look at it and try to decipher it.

As Michael Bluth says, “You certainly have a type."

While Pittsburgh seems to shrink, the job market corrodes and academia seems to expand and swallow me. Thus, I hole myself into this triangle, where the going is good, the sun never shines, and life is comfortably…comfortable.

I get why some people never leave Pittsburgh: because they can get away with being dirty losers (type 1) or, as a local entrepreneur told me, “big fish in a small sea”.

But the Steel City is hardly a sea, more a tributary, and the fish are more like shrimp. I learned this from my first college boyfriend and the company he kept. While at first I was entranced by his hipster entourage, the more I saw those people, the sooner I realized that most of them didn’t even have vocations. A lot of them were crusty and lame, and only in their little 412 micro chasm were they important people—to themselves. And while I’ve since learned to respect the music his band makes, I’ve also learned that it’s really easy to be a star amongst idle and inert hangers-on.

The factors that allow a young person to sustain himself in Pittsburgh are simple: low cost of living, ease of alternative transportation, and prevalence of college-aged fellow travelers. You can buy a house for less than $10,000 and fix it up, ride your bike everywhere most months of the year, and buddy up with kids you went to elementary school with—and never ever leave. For some, this is a respectable living, for others, this is a choice of immense economic reward, and for me, I’m really conflicted as to when to say “When”.

Two roads diverge in this yellow wood—attend graduate school at Carnegie Mellon and get a Master’s in Professional Writing. Then, make thousands more dollars when I enter a job market that, hopefully, will not be as dismal. This is option 1. Option 2 is, move to Hollywood and write for TV, the bravest and possibly most suicidal thing I could do. But this is something I know I could do. I love TV; TV raised me. What’s more, I write well, I’m damn creative, and I’m funny. And right now, if anything, people need to laugh. They need their faith in good television restored, by renegades like Tina Fey, and equally ambitious young bloods like me.

But at the end of the day, you gotta chase that paper. And at the end of the night, you’ve got to be happy. So somewhere around cocktail hour, you must strike a balance between profit and joy. Alas, Pittsburgh.

I certainly have a type.