Paris Letters (2 page)

I wrote junk mail. I wrote the garbage that goes straight from the mailbox to the recycling box. No flashy car commercials for me. No hip billboards. No. I wrote true junk mail. I mucked up websites with ads, stuffed bills with flyers, and inundated the public with information on products they probably didn’t care about and likely never asked for. That was me. Mailing out perfect forest after perfect forest of perfectly useless messages from Fortune 500 companies. I was directly involved with the noise of daily life.

You know that letter you received from the car insurance company about how you could save big if you switched now? That was me. And the one from your phone company that told you if you upgraded to a family plan, everyone would save? That was me too. And those extra slips of advertising in your electric bill, gas bill, and credit card bill? Me, me, and me.

I’m not a fan of this legacy of garbage but, as my colleague Jeff always reminded me, the checks cleared. Copywriting gave me two things I loved: those checks and something impressive to say about my career at parties. Everyone thinks advertising is slick. But it’s only slick in a greasy kind of way.

Sure, on occasion I had the chance to do a fun TV spot, but TV spots are big-budget endeavors, and with the stock market decline of 2007 followed by the flailing economy, companies were going for cheaper modes of getting the word out: direct mail.

During the first month of writing in my journal, I had a lot of questions about how I had become so miserable with my life. On the surface, everything looked fine. I was making a decent living. I had an apartment in Santa Monica with two parking spots (which is a big deal if you live in Southern California), and I had a nice handful of friends. Life should have felt great. I had just turned thirty-four and was hanging out on a rung near the top of the corporate ladder. But it started to dawn on me that my ladder was leaning against the wrong wall. How did this happen? One question swirled in my head and finally fell onto the page:

Whose dream life am I living? Because it’s certainly not mine.

I scanned through the history of my decisions for clues on how I arrived at this place. Immediately, I had the unpleasant realization that I was, in fact, living my dream life, but it was a dream life I had created after I graduated university when I didn’t know any better. I grew up; my dreams did not. Back then, more than anything, I had wanted to be a copywriter, and once I started working in an advertising agency, I learned I had a talent for it. I worked my way up to middle management, which afforded me middle management luxuries. I couldn’t afford to buy a house, but I could afford an apartment in Santa Monica—not beachfront, but beachfront adjacent.

And yet.

After a decade, I was drained and miserable, and I knew I couldn’t fulfill this dream for the long haul.

At the beginning of my advertising career, someone had mentioned that it’s easy to burn out. I thought this was crazy talk. At the time, I had just started writing the inserts that went into the phone bill, which, in advertising hierarchy, was considered a step up from writing the back of cereal boxes. I thought I had hit the big time or was well on my way to writing print ads and car commercials. Maybe one day I’d get the holy grail of advertising: a Super Bowl spot. Awards, accolades, and raises poured in. Well, they didn’t pour in, but there was a consistent trickle. And I loved every bit of it. But after the millionth headline and billionth copy change, I couldn’t use advertising to burn through my creative juices anymore. I was on autopilot. If writing direct mail wasn’t helping to get my creative energy out, I figured I’d have to burn it up in an artistic endeavor. But what? Up until then, I had dabbled in photography, jewelry making, painting, collage, guitar, and even bookbinding, but like most New Year’s resolutions, my enthusiasm for these pursuits waned, and I was left once again with plenty of creative energy but no outlet.

Could I just get another job at another agency? No, that wasn’t a solution. I had been in enough agencies at this point to know, as they say in Paris, same merde, different pile. And honestly, if I had to work in an advertising agency, the agency I was at was as good as any other. In fact, it was probably better than most, except for the staggering number of status meetings and the meager two-week vacation policy. But there were free snacks in the kitchen and as many Post-it Notes as I wanted. I should have been spending my time being grateful.

Perhaps all I really needed was another vacation. Not some grand journal-writing experiment. Not to become an artist. Or maybe what I needed was a boyfriend. More yoga. More kale. Therapy. Meditation. It was probably just because I am a Capricorn. I could blame my parents for that one. In fact, I could probably blame them for everything. Or karma. My knees. The golf balls of knots running down my back. My mouthful of mercury fillings. My sisters. My ex-boyfriends. Who else could I blame? Let’s get this party started!

No, no. No. Blaming people, places, or things wasn’t going to serve me on the road ahead.

By the second month of my year of journaling, I had used reams of paper to offload my gripes about work. It didn’t feel like any answers were coming, as Julia Cameron had promised. And yet, in a way, they were. By the end of February, as I literally saw before my very eyes just how much I complained about my job, a question was revealed. A question that had never occurred to me before. A question that was so juicy that I immediately abandoned the pursuit of becoming an artist. A question so startlingly simple that I am still astounded that I didn’t think of it before. At the end of yet another three pages of complaining about work, I sighed and wrote this question:

How much money does it take to quit your job?

I asked my colleague Akemi. We were sitting in her office picking through our salads.

“I don’t know. More than I’ve got,” she said, scrounging at the bottom of her cardboard box for bacon bits. “Plenty. Maybe a million dollars.”

“It would take me forever to make a million dollars. I’m talking about buying yourself a buffer of time so you can quit your job and figure out something else to do.”

We contemplated in silence for a minute, letting this question swirl. She set down her salad. “It depends on how much money you spend in a day. Multiply that by how many days you don’t want to work. Save up that amount. Easy.”

I set down my salad, astounded at the simplicity of this. “It’s like saving up to buy yourself your own sabbatical,” I said.

“Exactly.”

“How much do you spend in a day?”

“I have no idea,” she admitted.

“Me neither.”

“Say you spend $100 a day. That includes rent, gas, food, everything. You’d have to save $36,500 to live the same way for a year without work.”

“And use that year to figure out a way to buy yourself another year.”

“And so on.”

“And so forth.”

She picked up her salad. “But what would you do with your time?” she asked. “You’re a copywriter. That’s who you are.” Her eyes narrowed. “Is this about the vacation policy?”

“Maybe,” I replied. I swallowed hard on my kale. I was the official office griper about how little vacation time we were given. A mere nonnegotiable two weeks. I griped so loudly and so often that my boss hung a giant calendar on the wall outside my office and would mark down all the approved vacation time for everyone to see and for me to stare at from my office. While I worked my way through the pile of folders that came and went in my office, a Folder Parade if you will, I could peer through the glass and watch her conduct her Vacation Policy Parade. She would walk over to the calendar with my nervous colleagues in tow, their Vacation Request Forms shaking in their hands. She’d point at the calendar, “See here, there are already two art directors out that week. We need you in the office.” Dejected without a worthy comeback, they’d slink away Charlie Brown-style, cancel the plane tickets they’d already bought, take a few Tums, and come over to my office to process what just happened.

I had tissues, a loathing for the vacation policy, and a master’s degree in counseling, so they knew they were in a safe place to talk. They’d vent. I’d nod in agreement. They’d vent more. I’d nod more. I’d tell them where they had gone wrong and how they could improve their strategy for next time. “See here,” I’d point at their rejected Vacation Request Form. “When you wanted eight vacation days but you only accrued four? You can only pull that off with the help of a public holiday. Plus, don’t think about tacking on sick days. If you do that, you won’t get paid for any of them.”

Their eyes would bug out, and they’d stopped crying mid-sniffle. “What?! I won’t get paid?”

I would lean back in my desk. “It’s happened before.” I had anecdotes about others who had to cancel flights and work over Christmas, about someone being told they hadn’t accrued the time off to attend a funeral (me), about honeymoons reduced or rescheduled. Entire weddings were delayed until enough vacation days had been accrued for the honeymoons.

I was a Vacation Request Coach.

I always took one of my two weeks of vacation in Canada over Christmas to visit family. It would be months before I could take another week of vacation. I had already bought my tickets for Rome the following May and gotten my Vacation Request Form approved. I was on the calendar, which meant my vacation was as good as carved in stone. I started to wonder why I had chosen a life of twenty-minute lunch breaks, time sheets, and two-week annual vacation policies.

Akemi’s phone buzzed. “An email. Subject: Main Conference Room in two minutes. Don’t be late! It’s from you-know-who.”

By the way she jumped up, I knew exactly who it was. Taking her cue, we quickly gathered our containers, tossed them in the trash, and walked to the conference room. Being late would mean being scolded by our supervisor, who would tell us that we had to buck up and pull our weight around here. Then we would slink off and doodle hateful images in the margins of our notebooks.

Spankings, office-style.

The big emergency was a surprise office birthday party for whatshisname. Always awkward. Always necessary. These office birthday parties remind me of other dumb moments in corporate daily life, such as saying “hump day” when it’s Wednesday and “one more day” when it’s Thursday. We ask the same dumb questions: “How was your weekend?” on Mondays and “Got big plans for the weekend?” on Fridays. We share tips for how to make the best oatmeal in the office microwave (use cold water). We send a card around the agency with an envelope for you to throw in your extra bucks for the birthday/wedding shower/baby shower/going away gift.

When would it end?

Every time I slipped a couple of bucks in an envelope, wrote a pithy comment in a card, or sat through a sad rendition of “Happy Birthday,” I couldn’t help but sigh inwardly and think, This is not my life.

After the slick birthday cake from Ralph’s big-box grocery store, I returned to my office and began writing my daily three pages. Today’s journal entry took an interesting turn. Instead of griping about office birthday parties, reeling through what I should or shouldn’t have said to so-and-so in our disagreement about due dates or about how much I loathed filling out time sheets and permission forms, I thought about what Akemi had said and started writing money equations. This is nothing new. People everywhere are calculating their incoming and their outgoing. They are looking at the numbers and wondering how to make more, save more, buy more, pay off more, make ends meet, or how to have more money left at the end of the month rather than more month left at the end of the money.

How much money would it take to quit my job? Could I get by on spending just $100 a day in my future life…including rent, car, bills, food, everything? This number was arbitrary because I didn’t know how much I currently spent in a day. All I knew was that I could afford my current life and extras like that trip I was taking to Rome and eating out. But I still had credit card debt. I was still beachfront adjacent.

What I liked about her $100-a-day equation was that it was easy math. I have a wall in my brain with math. If you ask me a question about an equation, I’ll answer it with a blank look. But even I can multiply a number by 100. And this basic math skill was enough to keep my pencil on the paper, fooling with numbers. Say I would have a budget of $100 a day in my future life where I’m not working. If I took 2010 to save $100 a day, I’d have to save $36,500 by the end of the year. I already had some money in savings, but not much. $100 a day is not so impossible. So the preposterous, outrageous, ridiculously large, seemingly unreachable number of $36,500 became just saving or making $100 a day. A hundred bucks is something I can imagine quite easily. I can aim for $100 a day just by going to work and saying no to that group lunch or buying that sweater.

I could make this happen. I wasn’t sure how, but I’d figure that out later. For now, I had to save or make $100 a day.

Sitting at my desk with the number 100 staring me in the face, I finally understood what all the journal writing was about. I didn’t need to find an artistic pursuit, a hobby, or creative outlet. I needed to figure out how to save up enough to fund my own sabbatical, or even better, get out of my job. Perhaps even my career. I would create my own Shawshank Redemption.

I put down my pen and stared at the number. Forget finding my true art. Forget becoming an artist. I needed to become an escape artist.

DEAR ,

Exciting news! [It doesn’t matter what news it is, I’m going to make it sound exciting. This is where I tell you that there is a great offer, but it’s only available for a limited time so you’d better act now.]

The first bold subhead is usually a short version of the offer I described in the first paragraph.

That’s right, I’m going to say it again because I know you won’t read this whole letter, you’ll scan it, so I’ll sound like a broken record until you call the 1-800 number or visit us online.

The second subhead is the first selling proposition. I’ll tell you why we’re better than the other guys.