Resurfacing

You can judge me for eating
half-baked brownie goo more often than
medical professionals advise, though. 

It's been an embarrassingly long sabbatical, but I've cleared out the cobwebs and have flexed my writing muscles for something other than summarizing credit overlay matrices (which are a real thing; I didn't just make that up).  Like a duck that has held its breath and dug for grubs in the mud, or whatever it is that ducks to do get their food, I am now resurfacing.  Please do not judge the rest of this post by that truly awful simile.

In the Western world, there’s a very popular narrative that follows “conventionally successful” people.  It involves someone in a “conventionally prestigious career,” like law, medicine, finance, politics who has everything he or she is supposed to want but is lacking that life-affirming sense of satisfaction.  Said successful person takes a leap of faith and pursues that oft-cited road less travelled, changes his or her entire life, simplifies/streamlines/some variation of that verb, and finds that life-affirming sense of satisfaction.  Usually, this narrative involves a wealthy white person “finding him/herself” with the help of non-white people.  Eat, Pray, Love is probably what comes to mind (apparently the author was actually given an advance by her publishing house to finance her nine months of self-finding, if you’re curious).

This narrative doesn’t even have to involve the whole cultural shift.  Think of that guy you heard of who quit his job at Goldman Sachs to become a painter.  Think of the lawyer who was at his desk at 11pm, had an epiphany, quit his job, and moved his family out of the big nasty city and into a place where they might not be rich but where they could connect with nature and breathe fresh air.  God, think of that Nicolas Cage film The Family Man.  Weirdly enough, we’re taught to believe that all the things that are right to pursue are actually wrong and that breaking from convention! is where the true meaning of life lies.

(Just to fuck with you, though, you should still want all the things you should want.  I’m sure there’s a way to reconcile those two things, even though they’re mutually exclusive.  This is why there are so many Tibetan craft shops in places like Marin County.)

A year ago, I had a plan.  My plan was to get my TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) certificate and to teach English in China.  The end goal was to, after a year, have enough contacts that I could find a job in international trade or finance over there, which is a logical but definitely not a guaranteed outcome.  Everyone waxed poetic about how brave and exotic this plan was to the point that you would have thought I planned on becoming fluent in Lingala, hot air ballooning over the Congo River basin, and setting up a sculptors’ commune in the Ruwenzori Mountains.

I might have actually had somewhere to wear the multitude of traditional clothing I bought during my internship in Tanzania.  Pictured: me at 17, significantly less clued in to pretty much everything.

Needless to say, it was pretty flattering.  I felt terribly cool.

However!  To support myself while I got certified, I was writing and researching for one of my dad’s associates in the mortgage banking industry, which meant that I was working in not just in finance, but probably the most hated sector of finance (in case you somehow missed the ulcer-inducing collapse of the global economy back in 2008).  Saying that you work in mortgage banking is like the anti-free-spirit-breaking-from-convention.  As far as most people are concerned, you’re more interesting/more ethical/generally a better person in every way if you say that you’re a corporate lawyer…and people hate corporate lawyers.

The thing is, though, that I liked the writing.  I liked learning about the industry and watching and analyzing how the big-picture changes came into effect in response to government regulation or international economic movements or releases of consumer data.  I liked using my brain to wrap my head around the myriad moving parts and how they all affected one another.  No one in finance is supposed to find their job interesting—everyone is supposed to burn out, sell their soul to the devil, lose track of their true passion in their relentless pursuit of moneymoneymoney before falling, weeping, to their knees when they realize just how empty their life is, etc.—but here’s a dirty little secret: some people do.  I won’t say “a lot of people” in finance do, but rest assured that there are some.  I would know.  I’ve worked with them.

So last June, there I was, certified, ready to take my St Andrews degree to go teach English for $1500 a month.  I was up to my elbows in interviews, 95% of them with institutions that were clearly less than ethical in their dealings.  One recruiter told me that he wasn’t sure about actually getting me a job, but that I seemed like “a great girl” and had “a great smile” in my picture and that we should definitely meet up for a beer when I moved out there (oh, totally!).  Another offered me a job (which I accepted), wrote back two days later to say that it had actually been offered to someone else, and then repeated the process with two other positions.  Another told me I should fly to China on a tourist visa and that they would take care of getting me a work visa when I got there (nota bene: if there’s one thing you don’t want to fuck around with, it’s Chinese visas). 

The absolute last thing I wanted was to relocate across the Pacific at great expense and effort to find myself in trouble with the Chinese government with no support from my employee, shelling out insane money for a lawyer, and facing deportation.  If you go looking for horror stories of people that blindly accept teaching jobs overseas, you will find thousands in a matter of seconds—people getting deported, people getting unfairly fired, people signing contracts they can’t understand, people getting a quarter of the pay they’d been promised.  I was 22.  My parents had paid for eighteen years of private education (and a lot of other stuff).  I really, really didn’t want to call home broke and in tears and I really, really didn’t want to feel as though I’d spent another year dicking around before I was on a career path, which I saw as pretty key to becoming a real adult.

On top of that, as much as I loved Shanghai, early summer in the San Francisco Bay Area is seriously nice.  Waking up to yawning blue skies and warm sun day in and day out was glorious after having existed under British cloud cover for so long.  The taste of the drinking water, the ease of getting to the beach or Napa or Tahoe, the fresh produce, the unexpected enjoyment of having my family close by—these were all great.  The Bay Area might have been where I grew up, but deciding to stay here instead of going to Shanghai didn’t feel like a consolation prize (at all).  Not to mention the fact that, in terms of job hunting and laying down a career path, this is where the bulk of my contacts were.

I’m a bond trader now.  I spend a lot of time in Excel, have a calculator that I actually use on a daily basis, and discuss things like deliverables and ROI and risk management.  A typical day involves trading $35 million at a time to investors like JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, tracking the Cyprus bailout plan, and discussing strategy with our hedging guys on the east coast.  There are expensed dinners with investors where lighthearted chat gives way to hardball negotiation and bluffing after a few bottles of wine are put away.  The office is a total boys’ club, and I get a lot of flak if I order a vodka cranberry instead of a neat scotch when we go out for happy hour (“imagine if you’d ordered some pink girly shit like that when you were out with a bunch of other traders on Wall Street; they’d never take you seriously again”).

Outside of work hours, I live in a new apartment with pool, jacuzzi, gym, deli, and dry cleaner on site right next to the bay, and it feels like my own personal oasis.  If it’s 3am and I’m six miles from home in a bad neighborhood, I can take a taxi and not stress over how much more it’s costing than the bus.  When I’ve had an exhausting day, I can opt for takeout instead of trekking to the grocery store and cooking.  My friends and family will confirm that the quality of their birthday and Christmas presents has taken a turn for the better.  I can pick up the tab when one of my friends has a special occasion, donate as an alum to my schools, and leave the kinds of tips that I like to think are actually a pleasure to receive, as opposed to the you-can-tell-how-much-I-resent-this-particular-social-custom kind of tips.

Oh, and I should actually be able to get into the housing market down the line so I’m not hemorrhaging money for rent every month for the rest of my life.  O-M-effing-G.

So, if I were to be considered successful, it would be successful in a very conventional way—and I don’t even hate what I do!  Another dirty secret—in fact, I really like what I do, and I like the people I do it with!  No one’s going to make a Hollywood epic about it, but I’m pretty okay with the Eat, Pray, Love devotees and other free spirits not thinking that I’m doing something “cool.”

Years ago, I remember my dad saying that after decades in the industry, he still woke up every day excited to close another deal.  If I could at some point have that in a job, I thought to myself, that would be awesome.  I believed that, if I had a job that made me feel that way by the time I was fifty, I would have arrived.  I have that right now at age 23 (well, almost 24…urgh).  I genuinely look forward to going to work in the morning, which I’m fairly certain that that translates to satisfaction.  I’m not walking around in a perpetual state of existential ennui wondering how life got to be filled with so many things but to be so devoid of real meaning.  I’m actually pretty fucking happy. 

As for the idea that I turned down a life-changing opportunity or took the “boring” or “sell-out” path, I can see how my choices might have come across that way.  Consider this, though: there’s a reason that rent in San Francisco is astronomical.  People want to live here, and that’s because it’s a fantastic and bizarre city and it's San Francisco to the core—in no way does it feel like a so-called “typical” developed world city.  For all the experiences I may be “missing out on” by not living in China, there are an equal number I am getting by living here (like taking BART through downtown Oakland at 10pm on a Thursday—when you’re sober it’s terrifying, but when you’re buzzed it’s hilarious!).  I’m also sure that there are Shanghainese 23-year-olds who are working in finance who considered taking that alternative path and moving the San Francisco but who are tremendously happy with what they did opt to do.  Kind of like Chinese mirror Cecis.

Maybe my sixteen-year-old self, if I could get in touch with her, would be rolling her eyes at how very boring I turned out to be.  Keep in mind, though, that my sixteen-year-old self was in many ways kind of an idiot…and didn’t appreciate the value of a really excellent 1997 Napa Valley cabarnet.

This is where I get to live my life as a, uh, soulless drone.  

Why I don't write much anymore

The reason I don’t write much anymore is because I spend most of my time writing. What! What japes are these? you may exclaim. Since January I’ve been working in the wide world of mortgage banking consulting, which most people react to with an about-face and a bland ‘mmm.’ On the How Cool Your Job Sounds scale, mortgage banking consulting is one step above ‘I’m in insurance’ but still at the opposite end of the spectrum from Supermegafamous Rockstar Deity, modern day treasure hunter, and happenin’ club owner. I’m usually quick to add that it’s actually really interesting (really interesting!) but no one ever believes me. I’ll bide my time. You’ll see, when you’re trying to get an FHA loan but have disputed and/or outstanding collection accounts exceeding $1,000 and are desperate to know if there have been any recent underwriting policy changes, I’ll have the last laugh.

You can see the fruits of my labours at http://robchrisman.com/, though my name doesn’t go on any of it because for some reason mortgage folk tend to trust people with MBAs and several decades of experience in the biz over some punk 22-year-old who has never owned a property. If you want to go all out you can even subscribe to the daily commentary and talk shop with that plethora of mortgage bankers you know. There’s always a joke at the end, and no, I have nothing to do with that part (she said humourlessly). And I do mean to be more on top of putting stuff in the blog. Really, I do.

Plus I get to do this in California, which isn’t bad at all. Tee hee.

This isn’t meant in any way to be ‘promotional,’ and I’ve decided to finish it off with a picture from the simultaneously terrifying and hilarious 90s cartoon Bananas in Pyjamas.
























Somewhere along the line, there was a person who said, 'Let's make a children's show about anthropomorphised fruit that wears an article of clothing that rhymes with its name. Oh yeah, let's make them doctors too.'

Ruminations on my 24 hours away from St Andrews, part I

Last Thursday I went down to Durham for the night to attend a Bain & Company recruitment presentation, as working for Bain would pretty much be my dream job. Why they choose to hold an event at Durham and not at St Andrews I will never understand, but it did give me a chance to get out of the bubble, albeit briefly.

In spite of the vast majority of my train travel in the UK, it’s one of my favourite ways to get around. At the moment, I’m en route to Durham for the night—just a hop, skip and a jump down the east coast—and while I may have the mild urge to drop kick the pair of squalling Scottish children seated in front of me, the two that keep screeching ‘ticket, please!’ like they’re Mohammed receiving the f***ing Koran, I am for the most part enjoying watching autumnal Britain go past.

Part of this no doubt comes from being raised in California, a state whose expanse remains very much umarked by reliable passenger trains. If you want to get from San Francisco to LA, you have two options: fly or drive. If you want to get from San Francisco to pretty much anywhere else, your options are narrowed to driving. For the past twenty years, the mythical high-speed rail link between the two major cities has been debated, put on the ballot, and abandoned in a cycle that repeats itself over and over with absolutely no results (I haven’t been in California for four months now, though, and I’ve done a poor job of keeping up with the state politics—apart from Proposition 19 in the upcoming election—so I’m not sure what’s going on right now).
There is the much-hyped Coast Starlight Express, but I’ve never known anyone apart from tourists to take it because it’s usually delayed by about nineteen hours (not even an exaggeration; the freight trains have priority over the passenger trains or something like that). Hardly an efficient way to go from Norcal to Socal. It’s also possible to get the train up to Tahoe—the tracks run alongside Highway 80, carved so that they cling to the rugged sides of mountains and then laid to run through the meadow directly beneath the Sugar Bowl gondola—but again, it’s wildly inefficient, and the only people I’ve ever known to take it were my mom and brother back in the early nineties, when Ted was going through the same ‘train stage’ as every other little boy (unless they’re going through a dinosaur, airplane, car or other heavy machinery phase). I couldn’t begin to count the number of times I’ve wished there were a fast, direct ski train to Tahoe, the sort in those vintage posters from the 1920s (probably the best time to have been white and rich, in my opinion).

So I can recall pressing my face against train windows to look out at the Highlands, and twining through the fields of Tuscany on a slow train when Italy still used the lira, and being whipped past the vineyards outside of Bordeaux by the TGV. But, as for most Californians, trains do not feature very prominently in my childhood memories, and I came to associate them not just with going on holiday, but with a sort of comforting old world quaintness. Hence my fondness for them, quite apart from the fact that I just like going places. The journey up to St Andrews is particularly nice, as you get to go by the sea, across the oft-photographed Firth of Forth, through lots of picturesque bucolic fields, so on and so forth.

That’s not to say, however, that there haven’t been moments in my three-odd years of residence in Britain that have seriously tested my patience with the whole thing. Moments where I’ve wanted to tear up all of my little orange and white tickets and shout, ‘Forget the whole thing! I’ll take a taxi! I’ll hitchhike! I’ll crawl!’ Moments where the urge to drop kick noisy children in my carriage has been, shall we say, somewhat greater than ‘mild’. We’ve all experienced more than our share of delays, fat chavvy seatmates, broken heating, and dickish attendants, of course, but my journey back up to Leuchars from Sheffield last April was a veritable comedy of errors.

I wasn’t of the fittest of states to begin with, as I’d just come back from India a few days ago and was still recovering from a vicious bout of food poisoning that had left me weakened and bony (thanks to the disgusting-sounding shigella, I later found out). Plus I was still adjusting back to the brisk and chilling British climate after a fortnight of gloriously roastingly hot 40-degree sunshine in Rajasthan and was suffering from the cold even more so than usual. So I was content to let a man in an overcoat heave my backpack to the top shelf of the luggage rack and curl up in my coat for a nap until we reached Edinburgh. All was going to plan when, just south of Newcastle, the train began to slow ominously—the carriage held its collective breath—and then, to everyone’s acute despair, shuddered to a halt. We had sat there for about twenty minutes, rock-still, when the intercom came to life and the conductor told us, with fatigue in his voice, that the train had stopped. After delivering that earth-shattering piece of news, he said that the train had stopped due to ‘an unfortunate situation’. Again, absolutely shocking. Finally, we were told that we would have more information in a bit, and the utterly pointless announcement was over.
A few minutes later, the conductor told the passengers that we were stopped because not one but two people had thrown themselves in front of speeding trains just north of Newcastle. I don’t mean to be nasty here, but if I lived just north of Newcastle, I would probably be inclined to do the same.* Still, I have very little patience for people that choose to end it by standing in front of trains. I find it tremendously selfish—it’s terrible to be that depressed, of course, but why do they feel the need to ruin everyone else’s day in addition to their own? Apparently these two twits had buggered up the rail lines all over the northeast. Plus, I had no water left, which made my tongue feel like sandpaper, and the restaurant car had decided it couldn’t be bothered to sell things anymore. So I was ready to get home.

The train crawled into the Newcastle station, where we were meant to wait until the mess got sorted out. It would be at least an hour, the conductor informed us. I wouldn’t make my train from Edinburgh to Leuchars at this point, but it didn’t particularly worry me as I could just get the later one. But the hour came and went, and ninety minutes later, I was not only doubting that I would be able to make it home that night, I was dying of thirst. At this point the conductor came on the intercom again and gravely informed us that it would be at least another hour. Groans all around.

A crowd of people streamed out the carriage, myself amongst them and now slightly mad with thirst. I crossed over the tracks to the only shops that were still open—it was about half ten by this point—bought my water, cracked open the bottle and started guzzling right there. Feeling a bit better, I began to make my way back to the other platform. I was just ascending the stairs when my train made that funny puffing sound, came to life and began to pull out of the station.

There are few feelings worse than the one that comes over you as you watch your train leave without you. First off, you’re utterly powerless, unless you’re some kind of superhuman and sprint behind the thing, leap into the air and grab onto the outside of the carriage (not in the cards for yours truly). Second, you’re stranded in a place you don’t exactly want to be, with, as of now, no means of getting to the place you do want to be. To make matters worse, my backpack was still safely tucked away, right where the overcoat-wearing man had put it, and that particular train wasn’t terminating at Edinburgh. No, its final destination was Glasgow. Things didn’t look good for either me or the backpack, which would probably end up in the hands of some Weegie chav who would rifle through the thin, brightly coloured tunics and tiny marble elephant figurines, all coated with the ubiquitous layer of Indian dust, and wonder why he had stolen something so useless.

So, immobilised by shock and the nausea-inducing wave of dread that rolled over me, I watched my ride home and my luggage continue on their way north, the distance between us increasing with every chug. When it had disappeared from view, my legs came back to life and I went to find the nearest person who could help me sort out my rather crappy situation, a string of expletives running through my head. I found a very put out-looking man who resembled a large egg that someone had outfitted in an East Coast jacket for a laugh and spilled my story—the thirst! the multiple suicides! the one-hour delay that never happened! the backpack!—in one great rush and capped it all off by squeaking out a sufficiently pathetic ‘please, sir, what should I do?’

‘Jesus, there are like, six of you that did this,’ he grumbled. ‘Don’t you know you should never get off the train?’

Well, now I did.

The egg-shaped man spoke into his radio a few times. ‘Wait here,’ he instructed. I obeyed, rubbing my arms to try and keep warm and shifting my weight from foot to foot for the next twenty minutes. Egg Man returned just as a train rolled into the station and told me, ‘Just get on that one!’

‘Is it going to Edinburgh?’ I asked, no doubt sounding like a moron. I didn’t care, though; the last thing I wanted was to end up in Carlisle or something.

‘Yes! Yes! Just get on it! Quickly!’ he shouted, all but bodily shoving me towards it.

‘Erm, what about my luggage?’ I called after the man as he departed to have a fag.

‘You’ll have to ask once you get on that train,’ he yelled over his shoulder. And so I stopped asking questions and hopped onto the very empty and silent train that was supposedly going to Edinburgh.

For the next fifteen minutes, I wobbled my way up and down the length of the train like an unsteady foal, searching for someone—anyone—who appeared to work for the rail company and providing much amusement for all the seated passengers. Eventually I gave up and curled up on a pair of empty seats, wondering if I would have to pay for another ticket, how I would get back to St Andrews, if I would get back to St Andrews (as, at this rate, I would arrive in Edinburgh well past midnight), and when/if I would ever see that backpack again. I was mentally preparing myself to spend the night in Waverly Station—it would be cold, but I always carry a decent supply of sleeping pills in my handbag—when an attendant miraculously appeared. I scrambled up out of my seat and once again relayed my pathetic situation to this slightly less egg-shaped man.

The response was the same—I was an idiot for getting off the train, as were those five other people—but I was reassured that I would not have to buy a new ticket, my luggage would be offloaded and waiting for me, I would be sent up to St Andrews in a taxi, and no, I would not have to sleep on the floor of the station. My knees went weak with relief. By two am, I was soundly asleep under my goose-feather duvet back in St Andrews, clad in my mom’s old Berkeley jumper and no doubt dreaming of pleasant things like skiing and Starbucks frappuccinos.

And that is how I managed to get a taxi ride from Edinburgh straight to my front door and pay absolutely nothing for the privilege. I could have done without the near-coronary, though.

*I was typing this just before my train pulled into Newcastle and noticed the lady sitting next to me peer over my shoulder. She of course ended up disembarking at Newcastle and made sure to hit me with her handbag on the way out. I think I might have offended her.