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.'

Life After Uni: It's a Riot

I am fully aware that the last thing I posted is three months old, but I’m not sure that I can be bothered to make excuses or justifications. Erm...I've been busy? Anyway, here we are.

When it comes to the shift from university to ‘the real world’, clichés abound—stuff like ‘the beginning of the rest of your life’, ‘becoming a “real person”’, et cetera. If I’m entirely honest, though, I haven’t had one of those moments where I realise, with a hugely jolting shock, that, ‘Oh my God, my life has changed ENORMOUSLY!’ I suppose that was what was in my mind when I titled the blog ‘In Transit’, because this is meant to be THE transition. So I’m a little bit disappointed that I haven’t had some major epiphany. But then I thought about it. I’ve worked during the summer since I was fifteen, having done full-time summer jobs all through uni, so I’m used to working nine-hour days. I worked in a proper office job last summer, so I’m used to looking presentable, commuting and using my brain. I’ve had my own flat, I’ve had a salary, I’ve managed my finances, I’ve lived overseas, I’ve lived in a massive city. Is my ‘new life’ really that different, then?

Well, no. All of ‘adult life’ was kind of expected, in which case, thanks are due to my parents. Congratulations, Mom and Dad, you raised a kid who’s not having a nervous breakdown about replacing a light bulb (in all seriousness, I mean that—I’ve been really lucky to have the opportunities that made THE transition so smooth). On paper, all the stuff looks rather monumental...

1. I wore a sombre black robe and got handed a diploma (ie I graduated). For one rather surreal week, my family and I stayed in St Andrews and drank a lot of champagne. I had stressed that, although it may have been June and California may have been Barcelona-sunny, Scotland would be grey, cool and breezy. They soon realised that I was not exaggerating and expressed wonder at how I had survived there for four years. Anyway, one long, Latin-filled ceremony and one mind-shattering graduation ball later, I found myself on the Caledonian Sleeper to Euston, bidding goodbye to St Andrews and goodbye to Scotland. It’s not like I was heading off to war, and plans have already been made for a cheeky weekend back up, so this was a lot less emotional than it could have been.
























This is me, but edumacated

2. I signed a contract for a job in London. A few years ago, this would have been entirely unremarkable, but now that the global economy is in the toilet, it does feel like slightly more like an accomplishment. It’s in PR, which isn’t my dream industry, but it puts money in the old RBS savings every month, so...you know. Amongst other things, it gives me an excuse to shop at Banana Republic for things like grey pinstriped trousers, which, if you’re unemployed, just look kind of try-hard.
























Employment is SO cool!

3. I signed a contract for a flat, also in London. When I was in California for the three weeks between the end of term and graduation, my brother told me, ‘You’re going to be living in a hovel—just so you know’. Ted has never exhibited any clairvoyant tendencies (rather, any particularly acute ones), so I’m not sure where he got that, but it turned out to be wrong. There are a few cons—it looks a little like a crack den from the outside, our landlord is kind of a bitch, and I accidentally blew up the oven a few weeks ago—but the interior is lovely. It gets tonnes of light, has a massive and recently refurbished kitchen, and comes complete with a balcony. On top of that, it’s a stone’s throw from Clapham Common and the tube. We also have a lot of Caribbean neighbours with gloriously cool accents, and, true to the Caribbean stereotype, they listen to really catchy music and cook food that smells delicious. Allie and I are working on getting a dinner invite somewhere.
























We looked at a flat about two feet away from this sign. Unsurprisingly, we opted not to live there.

4. I established a routine whereby I commuted from aforementioned flat to aforementioned job. Every morning, I hit the snooze button a few times, pelt out the door about ten minutes later than I intend to, and squeeze onto a Northern line train whose person-to-space ratio rivals that of the Shanghai metro at rush hour. After my first week of work, I admit that I was so exhausted that, zombie-like, I boarded a northbound Victoria train instead of the southbound one that would take me home. I completely failed to register the stop at Green Park and got to Oxford Circus before I realised that something wasn’t quite right. It also kind of makes me hate the general public even more than usual—I find that my ‘excuse me’ sounds more like a threat than a request these days—but Clapham Common to Victoria is a short commute by London standards (thirty minutes).
























How commuting makes me feel sometimes

...but, let’s be honest, everyone does this (apart from blowing up the oven). Unless they get signed for a record deal or descend into hipsterdom. How I hate hipsters.

Things wasn’t quite expecting?

1. The worst riots London has seen in thirty years...in my backyard. I’ve been lucky enough to have avoided pretty much any kind of violent conflict in my lifetime, but as someone who’s never even been mugged, I can’t help but worry on occasion that I’ve got a bull’s eye between my shoulder blades, or maybe a flashing neon sign on my forehead that reads ‘WALKING UPPER-MIDDLE CLASS CASHPOINT WITH MINIMAL UPPER ARM STRENGTH’. Needless to say, when the news said that there were a thousand angry, fearless rioters making their way up Lavender Hill towards my house, I was a bit shaken. After Allie pointed to flames and hooded figures on her computer screen and said, ‘Look, we’re on the news’, the two of us, doing our best to seem casual, drew all the blinds and locked and barricaded our doors. My little chilli plant, which lives on our kitchen window sill, seemed especially vulnerable with its delicate green stalks waving in the air, so I tucked it behind the toaster. It then dawned on me that the looters were going after plasma TVS, not chilli plants, and that if a bunch of lawless yobs broke into my house, I would do better to worry about my laptop, jewellery, or skull. The riots themselves have stopped, but this whole thing, whatever it may be, is far from over. When people ask where I live and I tell them Clapham, I get a response that goes something like ‘Oh my God, was your flat okay?’, usually accompanied by a concerned and sinister ‘oooh’ sound. It’s as if I said that I grew up Darfur.

















What immediately comes to mind when I tell people where I live (photo actually taken in Croydon, I'll have you know)

2. Even ‘real people’ get excited about free food and free booze. Last Wednesday, we had a company rounders tournament and picnic in Hyde Park (company-mandated fun) that included a load of wine, sandwiches, quiche, hummus, crudités, and those delicious vegetable crisps that I wish weren’t so expensive. As we all clustered on our blankets and watched the sky fade to dusky pink, the main topic of conversation was, yes, the free food and booze. Similarly, the last half hour of Friday afternoons, which sees a company-wide ‘tea’ where ‘tea’ actually means ‘wine’, is when my coworkers are at their most animated. The cheese twists and chocolate buttons are practically hoovered up, the company manages to work through half a dozen bottles of sauvignon blanc in an impressively short time, and chatter fuelled by weekend euphoria fills the room. When, if ever, do free food and booze become less exciting?



















Cue mass hysteria!

3. A taste for seriously black coffee. As someone who fixes her coffee in such a way that it wouldn’t look out of place on a Viennese dessert cart, believe me, this was unexpected. I’ve found myself brewing coffee so strong and dense it could probably sit up and bark. Rocket fuel. Liquid crack black as the night. So intense that, if I brew a cafetiere and leave it in the kitchen downstairs, I feel obligated to leave a warning note. It leaves me feeling like that guy in Get Him to The Greek after he gets an adrenaline shot to the heart, which isn’t a good thing per se, but it definitely beats the sinking exhaustion brought on by, you know, being awake in the morning. I thought that caffeine addiction was just one of those office clichés, but it turns out that a good dose of it really does make work more bearable.














Me after my morning cup o' joe

4. There’s a fox that loiters outside my window at night. Yes, a real-live fox in Zone 2. What? Would you have expected that?















Hehehe!

I’m sure there are others too.

So. ‘Real life.’ All that I’ve come to conclude is that it’s not nearly as terrifying as everyone makes it out to be, but also that it doesn’t inspire some kind of massive celebration where there are champagne corks flying and everyone dressed to the nines.



















Hooray for not being a total screwup!

Not the next Aesop’s fables, but I suppose I can leave you with something about life being a journey, not the destination.

Hmm. That’s pretty milquetoast. Check back in a bit.

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

British ‘summertime’ is officially over. As far as I’m unofficially concerned, British summertime was over in late May, which saw the end of that fantastic three-day heatwave in St Andrews (which was great; everyone was lounging around in their shirt sleeves in beer gardens and getting sunburnt after their exams). Anyway, today was the first day where I looked out the window halfway through my three o’ clock tutorial to see St Andrews wreathed in darkness, with a fierce and icy rain striking the glass to boot. As I wrapped my head in my scarf to walk over to my four o’ clock Starbucks date, I watched my own fingers turn bluish white and felt a slow, sick dread roll over me. Indeed, winter is here…FOR THE NEXT SIX MONTHS. Maybe I exaggerate. But not by much! My sunlamp—the big square cube of light that sits on my desk and simulates UV rays and keeps me jolly in these dark months—is said to be most effective when turned on for ninety minutes a day, but in reality, it will be pulling much longer hours than that.

Anyway, I digress.

As I mentioned earlier, I spent last Thursday night down at the University of Durham attending a Bain & Company presentation, because they don’t send anyone up here. Considering that it’s widely acknowledged that St Andrews is generally superior to Durham in pretty much every way, this is perplexing (not that I’m biased or anything). I won’t go into details about the event itself, because it would probably bore the pants off anyone without a specific interest in consulting, apart from saying that it was really well done, definitely worth the trip, and ended with free wine and free case study interview technique CDs. It was being in the town of Durham that I found pleasant enough, but somehow weirdly unnerving.

Durham, for those without an intimate knowledge of UK university or cathedral towns, is in the northeast of England just south of Newcastle. It’s on the London-Aberdeen railway line and provides a lovely view of the castle and cathedral, which are perched on a hill above the River Wear, as you go by. If you look it up on Wikipedia there will be lots of stuff about ‘the finest examples of Norman architecture’ and so forth, and I believe they shot part of a Harry Potter film there, which gives you a general idea of how the place looks. I actually considered applying to uni there at the ripe old age of seventeen and visited with my mother in the summer of 2006; it was the first British university I visited (preceding York, Edinburgh, St Andrews, Trinity, Oxford, Bath and Cambridge). As our boisterous tour guide led us around St Chads college and made comments like ‘and you will become familiar with this pathway after stumbling down it on many a drunken night’, I could hear Mom making disapproving Marge Simpson noises under her breath. Later, as we went out for dinner, we were treated to lots of sloppy public renditions of what sounded like oom-pah-pah beer songs, as the centre of town was packed with students on the lash due to it being World Cup time. ‘I don’t know,’ my mom sniffed. ‘There seems to be quite a drinking thing going on here.’ Oh, Mom.

At any rate, I didn’t end up applying to Durham and haven’t given the place much thought for the past four years. I suppose it’s always been there in the back of my mind as a calling point on the east coast rail line and as a sort of B-list St Andrews—a kind of place for Oxbridge reject-rejects (but that’s a bit harsh, and opening up a whole other can of worms).* And now all of a sudden there I was, forced to blend in and pretend I was one of them! Well, not entirely, as I had emailed the Bain recruiting team early and asked if it was okay that I attend, even if I didn’t study at Durham, and they had said yes. But still!

What I found unnerving was that, in many ways, Durham is a lot like St Andrews. It’s a small, rural, self-contained town dominated by students. It’s very picturesque, with its magnificent architecture, cobbled streets, stone bridges, the river twining through, and its rolling fields all around. The student body seems to be decently international, as well (I think). There’s the standard array of high street shops, cafes and restaurants—Jack Wills, Costa, Pizza Express, et cetera. People even dress the same to some degree—pashminas adorn most necks. But it lulls a St Andrean into a kind of false sense of security, because the town is just different enough to throw you off.

Durham is small, but, as I set off through those cobbled streets, I became increasingly aware of the fact that it’s not quite as neatly contained. And picturesque as it may be, Durham, I realised, is full of hills. I had noticed that no one’s shoes seemed to have a heel of any kind—now I knew why. The heel on my black boots isn’t very big, but my feet, accustomed to the friendly flatness of St Andrews, began to complain. Another thing—those three streets we all joke about? They’re a blessing. The streets of central Durham twine up and down those hills without rhyme or reason, which is immensely frustrating when it’s nine at night and you’re looking for sustenance and you keep hitting dead ends, cathedrals, or dark alleyways that practically advertise themselves to rapists and crack dealers.

So it was of course immensely pleasant to arrive back home, where everything is within fifteen minutes’ walk and you have to be a veritable imbecile to get lost. There are times when it may be a bit claustrophobic, and when the weather makes you want to never go outside ever again, and when the sun sets before you even get a chance to look at it properly, but really—here’s to you, St Andrews. For so many reasons.

*I, too, was rejected from Oxford. I applied to do history and French with the idea that I would work in Central Africa, specifically the Democratic Republic of the Congo). After a disastrous interview up in Vancouver, during which I was given a block of text to discuss that was so dense and erudite that it literally made me shake with fear, those hopes were dashed. Frankly I’m glad that didn’t work out, because God knows I would have had much less fun and God knows where I would be right now. The Congo, probably.