I got my first job right out of high school. My photojournalism teacher had a photography and printing business and brought me on as a graphic designer the summer after graduation. My job mostly consisted of designing pages for football programs. You know, yoked out football players drenched in gatorade sweat and lightning bolts – that kind of thing. I worked there for 10 months, got paid $10 per page as a contractor during football program season, then minimum wage the rest of the year (which in 2007 was $6.25, only a dollar less than it is today, 18 years later).
I worked my next two jobs while I was taking a semester off from college. The first, a Kitchen Designer/Sales Associate gig at Home Depot in Weslaco, paid $9 an hour, and I hated every second of it. I took long lunches, slacked off, and complained so much that after just two weeks, I was asked to resign. My next job was a seasonal Best Buy gig working in the “Digital Imaging” department, this was where they kept all the cameras at the time. I don’t know what it’s called today, but I hated this job too! I’d have a great conversation with a customer one moment and get in trouble for not turning it into a sale the next. One day, I told my supervisor that it didn’t feel right to manipulate people into spending money, that it felt heartless. To this, my boss replied “well if you want to work in sales, you can’t have a heart”. I’ll never forget that. To no one’s surprise, I was not called back after the season ended. Funnily enough, however, one of those sale-less customer interactions ended up getting me back in school.
You see, I was taking a semester off from school because I was depressed. I’d really wanted to study film at NYU (because Tunde Adebimpe, the singer of TV On The Radio, studied film there and I wanted to be a cool musician/filmmaker like him) but I didn’t get into their film program. Then I tried applying to Full Sail in Orlando, because they had a 21-month Film program that seemed legit (though I’d learn later it wasn’t), but my folks couldn’t afford to pay my tuition, nor were they in any place to co-sign on loans with me, so I ended up enrolling at what would eventually become UTRGV, then known as UTPA. As a young person with a fairly negative opinion of the Valley (see: “nothing cool ever happens here”), staying here felt a lot like “settling”. It felt like failure. I did one semester as a Communications major (closest thing to being a film student) and was immediately put off by the department’s integration of Film, Television, and Theater, so the following semester I switched my major to Art. I’d been drawing all my life, so I thought it could work as a backup. As luck would have it, I ended up hating my Drawing professor – a man more concerned with the way I held a pencil than what I created with it. After a few weeks, I stopped going to his class. Eventually I started skipping all my classes, wasting the money my parents paid for my tuition and absolutely burying my GPA in the process. It seemed like all I could do was fail. I’d already failed as an artist, and was now failing as a student. Once I picked up the retail jobs I failed as an employee, too. Twice. Despite being 19 years old and not having much life experience to speak of, I was convinced my life was over. Truly convinced, if you catch my drift.
This is what has guided me everywhere I’ve been in my life, for better or worse. Some lessons are easier to learn than others, of course, but I’ve found that the harder a lesson is to learn, the more important it tends to be. This year was a hard one. No doubt about it. But I’m grateful for it just the same. Steps, pages, lessons…whatever you wanna call ‘em, the more the merrier.
AS
