hobnobbing

It’s the first day of fall. And I am overjoyed.
I’m sitting on the patio of a Starbucks in Roscoe Village, staring up at a cloudless blue sky knowing that in a few hours, I’ll be enjoying one of the many perks of being a full-time freelancer: heading to Wrigley Field for a day game, watching the Cubs lose their last home game of 2011.
There’s a man across the street with a can of spray paint the same color as his city-issued safety vest, blocking traffic and drawing arrows every which way from corner to corner. Sometimes it’s best not to ask questions.

I’m shivering in my long-sleeved T-shirt and light scarf but totally unwilling to go inside, breathing in cool air spiked with possibility (and some paint fumes, if I’m lucky, I guess). Wrapped up in this crazy idea that absolutely anything can happen right now. Which is true for every day, every moment, but for now, there’s nothing scary about it, nowhere to go but up. And I don’t say that because I’m at rock bottom — I’m far from it, actually — but because I choose it.
As I sit here sipping my $4 soy chai, it occurs to me that this is goddamn ridiculous.
Not the “everything’s comin’ up Paige” attitude I’ve adopted, but the fact that I have very little money coming in but still insist on buying this drink nearly every day. At least $100 every month, down the drain with the swipe of a pretty little gold card. My drink orders are not passive transactions like my other — so. many. other. — credit-card purchases: I have to reload the stupid gold card to get my soy upgrade gratis. I know exactly how much I’m spending.

SO, TOMORROW. (Man, I’m terrible at segues from Real Writing to…whatever this is.)
Tomorrow night, I will very responsibly take public transportation to the Gold Coast and learn how to slow my roll.

My good friend Nicole, who found herself in a similar self-employed pickle just months after an ill-fated career choice, is the creator of Ms. Career Girl, a fantastic website for young women looking for career and life advice. Nicole is much better than being a grown-up than I am.
In addition to the gorgeous website that gives me blog envy every time I visit, she’s also started doing live networking events in Chicago. There’s another one after work on Thursday evening, Sept. 22 — it starts at 6 p.m. — at Proof. Yes, the nightclub. Yes, I know. Gross.

Here’s a look at what to expect at this event, a panel discussion with women who are experts in their fields:

• Home Ownership: How much mortgage can you afford? How much money should you plan on putting down? What if you have a poor credit score?
• Tackling student loans and improving your spending habits
• How to use life insurance as a retirement, college or wedding savings tool (Ed.: I have no idea what this is, this “wedding” you speak of.)
• Owning a home in Chicago: what you need to know about property taxes, special programs and condo associations.
• Why insurance is crucial to long term financial success and building wealth.
• Should you focus on cutting costs or earning more money?
• Why should someone in their twenties have life insurance? What kinds of life insurance are there?

Also, there will be champagne.

Back at Starbucks…I gave up and came inside. I’ll tell myself it was because I needed a power outlet. Truthfully, though, hypothermia will not be a good look for me tomorrow night at Proof (though it would seem hyperbole always is).
A woman walked in with three little boys, each wearing bicycle helmets and capes. They didn’t ride bikes here. Two of them — brothers, I assume — have red and blue vinyl capes and matching bright-green helmets with scales and decals to make them look like dinosaurs; the third has a plain blue helmet, but his cape is made from a silk scarf. He’s a paisley superhero.
I love them, and I don’t even know them.
As they stand with their faces pressed to the window, screaming at the top of their little lungs for no good reason, I realize this is a huge part of why I throw money at an automatic espresso machine every morning. Little moments like this.
But maybe tonight, I can start to figure out how to balance the moments of people watching and baby dreaming with affording to make those dreams a reality at some point. Reaching? Maybe. But it’s true.
You should come tomorrow night. We can meet in person. And drink champagne. And learn how to grow up and start saving money. And, you know, buy houses and get married and be successful in the long term.
Dear god, the future terrifies me. Even if it is all uphill from here.

Champagne.

Disclosure: Nicole offered me free entry to the event if I wrote about it. So I’m asking you to pay for a ticket, but I’m already going for free. Nyah, nyah, nyah.

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“I realized about a year ago that I couldn’t have a complete thought anymore, and I was a tweetaholic. I had four million Twitter followers, and I was always writing on it. And I stopped using Twitter as an outlet and I started using Twitter as the instrument to riff on, and it started to make my mind smaller and smaller and smaller. And I couldn’t write a song.”

— John Mayer, quoted in Rolling Stone on why he went off Twitter cold turkey

People who aren’t on Twitter will undoubtedly roll their eyes at this. Maybe you didn’t even hear about this when it happened; it was months ago. But for a lot of Twitter users, even if we did roll our eyes — or quietly celebrate Mayer’s departure from Twitter, because he’s an asshole — it actually was cause for some reflection.

In the three years since I joined the site, I’ve written just shy of 50,000 tweets, amassed almost 3,500 followers. Apparently I write an average of 38 tweets a day. Last night, I live-tweeted the Emmys. Sorry, the #Emmys. I am not proud of this. But I didn’t even think about it; I was alone in my apartment, near-robotically shoveling Thai food into my mouth, and completely robotically type-type-typing away on my Twitter client. Snarky shit that the world easily could have done without.

Snarky.

That’s become the word most often used to describe me. Not generous. Not thoughtful. Not talented. Snarky.

Because, well, I’m sort of a bitch on Twitter. I guess that’s my thing. And it’s common knowledge that once enough people see that you project yourself in that way, even if it’s not how you and your closest friends see you, well…

I hate that. I’m a nice person. But throwing that insistence into the ether without anything to back it up is just as hollow a gesture as it seems. The snarky wheel gets the grease, and I like the attention. I am not proud of this. But what’s a sweet girl to do when the insular online world loves her snark? (Until they hate it.)

I know this is the world that a lot of us live in now. It certainly is for me. And my fascination — okay, obsession — with Twitter hasn’t just been for the sake of online popularity; I’ve gotten job leads, free meals, dates, freelance work and mentions in such illustrious publications as the Chicago Tribune and Wall Street Journals — for putting myself out there as much as I do. I’ve made so many friends and learned from so, so many professional contacts that I’d never even have had access to without Twitter.

And I am proud of this.

But what suffers as a result? My long-form creativity. It breaks my heart.

I’m depressed as hell when I look back at my blog for the past few months. I know, I know: Quality over quantity. But then I remember how hard it’s been to write the posts that are there — and how many of them I’m actually proud of — and I’m even more depressed. For the most part, writing anything longer than a couple hundred words has been like pulling teeth. And I lost all my babies a long, long time ago.

It hurts.

And then? That fixation on immediate gratification — with page hits, with comments, with retweets of the post’s link on Twitter — sets in. And that isn’t healthy either. At some point, it actually felt good just to write. Beyond that: just to know that someone might see it and enjoy it.

Not only do I rarely feel that intrinsic joy anymore, but it’s also hard for me to produce anything that could create it in the first place.

“Rainy days and Mondays always get me down,” I’d have tweeted this morning, maybe with a TwitPic of the rippling puddle at the corner outside Starbucks attached. And the emphatic retweets, the sympathetic replies, would follow.

Well, not today. Today, I keep my 140-character quips to myself. On the first day of Chicago’s Social Media Week, so begins my (probably) one and only Day Without Twitter. I wonder whether anyone will think I’ve died.

More truthfully, I wonder whether anyone will notice. Because for as “LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME!” as Twitter is, it begs the question of how many people have been mentally trained, Clockwork Orange-d, into watching, just like I have.

Finally, let me be clear: In publishing this, I’m not looking for congratulations on my Herculean sense of self-control, or this keen introspection I’ve done here. (Real. Keen.) This is about self-improvement. Because while there are a few people growing tired of my snark and constant tweeting lately — and a few more bemoaning the lack of posts on my blog — I can safely say I’m at the top of both lists.

And if there’s one thing Twitter has taught me, it’s this: It’s all about me.

Me. Me.

Me.

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