Those who can’t do, teach; those who can’t do anything, substitute teach.
As students, we learned almost nothing about them. Where did they come from? What do they do? Why are they here and not at a real job? It was a mystery, and one that I never intended to solve. But I live at home at twenty-five years old and something has to be done about that.
“You should think about subbing,” my mom said to me after what may have been weeks of racking her brain trying to figure out what film school graduates can actually do with themselves once they leave the comforts of college, and thus excuses. With seconds of careful thought I responded with all the rationality and maturity I’d gleaned from those 4 (or 5) years of hard work: “Ew, gross.”
I mean, really. I’m way too cool for that kind of thing. Just as I’m way too smart to work in fast food, way too creative to work retail, and way too free-spirited to work in a cubicle (visualize something with a bird and a cage…). But hold on. Oh yes, that’s right, I still live with my parents.
Just to clarify, I like my parents, they’re nice people. They pay for stuff and give me space, and I clean the kitchen. It works out. And at this point, it wasn’t as though I didn’t work. I just didn’t work a lot. I worked freelance, which is code for “I work when I want to”. Admittedly, this was not often.
“You need a flexible schedule. It would be perfect for you.” And she was absolutely right, I did need a flexible schedule for getting depressed about not knowing what I was going to do with my life and rarely being able to find the kind of work I wanted to do. With subbing, I could still do that and make money at the same time! But of course, there was the problem that high school wasn’t so far behind me, and the idea of going back, even in a different and seemingly more powerful capacity, gave me the undeniable sense of having gotten nowhere.
The thing with feeling that way though, is that money is important. No, that sentence doesn’t make sense, but on we go… I don’t worship it, or love it, or swim in it. I just like it and need it for things. Things like paying future rent and buying food and clothing. And “working when I want to” became “working when I can – which is not often enough”. So sitting in class for 6 hours telling kids to sit down and shut u- please be quiet and little else for more money than I would make working retail or other jobs my major qualified me for, suddenly seemed okay.
Thus, I became Ms. Welch and agreed to share my awesomeness with the youth of Southern California, who in return would provide me with some fairly entertaining stories to share…
