I have nightmares from time to time that I’m sent back to high school. I had one yesterday morning. I was sitting in a classroom next to a friend of mine. “I can’t believe I’m back in high school,” I said to her. “I’d rather go back to college before I went back to high school.”

I woke up, shook off my sleepiness, and looked at the quote-a-day calendar on my nightstand. “Never economize on luxuries.” –Angela Thirkell. August 31st, 2009. At this time a year ago I was frantically trying to move into my apartment at school, hugging and how-was-your-summering twenty times a day. I went downstairs for some coffee and a bagel. My mom greeted me, “How’s the job search?” I grunted, “The usual.” She then told me that I should try substitute teaching at the high school where she works. “I know it’s an early start, and it’s not exactly what you want to do, but it would be some money coming in.” I told her I’d think about it. I’m not in the habit of making decisions before coffee.

Lately I’ve been Googling myself more than I’d care to admit, wondering what prospective employers might see. Not much comes up that’s not already on my resume, except for a couple thousand unrelated hits generated by my Portuguese last name. Apparently there’s another Elizabeth Galvao in Brazil. I found her LinkedIn profile. She hasn’t been putting off setting one up forever because she’s too lazy to fill out forms. She attended the Universidade de São Paulo and probably majored in something marketable and relevant. She probably looks like Gisele and zips around in a fabulous little European car and knows how to wear a scarf more than two ways. And she has a job in the capital markets industry, which sounds very Important and Successful. She would probably never end up with a four-year-old laptop whose keys are sticky and clack as loudly as an old typewriter because she spilled overpriced juice on them. Clearly, she is winning.

Willa originally considered naming this blog “What Do You Do?” because of the power of that question over our identities and feelings of self-worth. I was very proud to identify myself as a student at Vassar College. It was something I’d worked very hard to be, and I was pretty good at it. Now I’m just unemployed. I feel like the middle gray card we used to calibrate our light meters when I took photography in high school. Undefined.

I started taking photos in high school for the same reason I started writing crappy poetry and playing the guitar and making my own clothes: because this town bored me to death and I had to find ways to occupy myself while plotting my escape. Now that I’m back here to live indefinitely, it is quite a bit like I’m back in high school. Yet it’s not exactly the nightmare I once envisioned. I’m still plotting my escape to the big city, but I’m finding ways to occupy myself. For four years, I traded hobbies for classes that interested me and friends who were never short on conversation. It was a good trade, one I’d gladly make twice, but I’m happy to be writing and making use of Photoshop again. I’m happy to be able to go see movies in the theater and exhibits in New York, even if I can’t really afford it. At Vassar I rarely found the time to do any of those things.

So, yes, it’s now September, my scary deadline, and I’m still unemployed. But that’s not all there is to me. I’m slowly coloring in the middle gray. Part of that is accepting that I might be here for a while. I’m going to apply to work as a substitute teacher tomorrow. I’d probably get some good anecdotes out of it, and I need a new laptop if I’m going to keep writing at this pace. I read somewhere that one should never economize on luxuries.

Last night I was standing in a hot room on the sixteenth floor of a high-rise in midtown Manhattan, surrounded by a dozen or so ridiculously cute little girls and their mothers, who varied from your typical high-strung stage mom to the patient good sport. One of the former stood two feet away from me, talking into her cell phone. “I don’t know, they don’t seem to be very organized,” she said, sounding irritated. I clutched my clipboard and smiled at her.

I’d gotten the gig, helping out with auditions for a short indie film, through a friend of mine (an ‘09 graduate from another college) who’s been working on the project as a casting assistant. There was some franticness due to crawling Lincoln Tunnel traffic and a shortage of scripts, but overall it was a fun couple of hours that we capped off with diner food and True Blood once back in New Jersey. The fact that it happened on the same day that I’d gotten called about a different unpaid gig made me start thinking about unpaid work in general, and why so many of us have ended up doing it.

In my freshman econ class, my professor told us not to worry about the upwards of $160,000 that our education would cost, for we would earn substantially more because of it. Yet here I am. In a week from Saturday I’ll be attending my class’s 100 Nights After Graduation party in a city I hoped I’d be living in by now with nothing but unpaid work to my name.

In the car, my friend sang songs from Avenue Q, remarking that lately she can’t stop thinking about how true the lyrics have become for her.

What do you do with a B.A. in English,

What is my life going to be?

Four years of college and plenty of knowledge,

Have earned me this useless degree.

I can’t pay the bills yet,

‘Cause I have no skills yet,

The world is a big scary place.

Five months ago, over our last spring break, I bet her fifty dollars that she would have a job by graduation, as she’s one of the most ambitious and driven people I know. I’m relieved she hasn’t remembered our bet. She told me that when she entered college, graduates of her major had a record of 100% job placement in the entertainment industry. Of the graduates of the same major in 2009, not one has an industry job. My smart, highly qualified friend is currently doing mind-numbing temp work at an insurance agency.

I want it to be clear that I’m not whining. I understand it’s a difficult time for many people, regardless of age or college degree. My father, the Baby Boomer, is out of work, too. The other day he told me, “I’m worried that with the unemployment you might get depressed. I know myself it can be frustrating. I just wanted to say,” and here he began to yell, “Don’t get depressed! We have enough to deal with!”

And that is basically my message. Unemployed of America, I share in your frustration and disappointment. I share in your dwindling bank accounts and rapidly receding periods of health care coverage. I share in your hours spent on Craigslist and dozens of resumes and cover letters sent out that receive only silence in return. I share in your terror when receiving mail from your student loan lenders, and I share in your unbridled joy when receiving a ten-spot from your Grandmas. I share all of these things with you, Unemployed of America, but still I say to you, DON’T GET DEPRESSED! WE HAVE ENOUGH TO DEAL WITH! Find a way to be productive, even if it doesn’t pay, and even if it’s just writing for your friend’s blog. And believe me when I say that it helps.

Young people don’t know anything, but think they know everything. I believe that I know at least this much.

One thing I admit to not knowing is when exactly I will accept being lumped into a pre-labeled generation. My parents proudly identify themselves as Baby Boomers, yet I find it nothing but irritating to read descriptions of “Millennials.” The name itself scarcely makes sense, as most of us were born in the 1980s. It’s not that these descriptions don’t apply to me at all; I’m Internet-savvy, I listen to alternative music, and I spent a lot of energy getting into college. Yet these articles that break down my supposed personality and entitlement in the workforce make me feel like I’m part of a scientific experiment.

I have also generally not had a positive reaction to any sentence that begins with, “Your generation.” To be fair, most of these come from my father, who simultaneously blames my generation for the rise of reality television and is all too happy to remind me that we will have to deal with the effects of global warming, as he “will be dead by then.”

I resent being lumped into the Milennials just as I resent blanket statements about women or people from New Jersey. And in that respect I am sure I’m being truly young and truly dumb, to actually believe myself to be an individual and not a birth date with predetermined actions based on race, gender, and class. After all, what did I learn at my fancy liberal arts college if not that I’m white and privileged and should shut the fuck up about my problems?

You know, maybe they were right about us after all. Here I’ve been complaining about not having a job, companies expecting college graduates to intern full-time for nothing but a recommendation, how my friends with jobs are just doing work that means nothing to them to make a few bucks, etc. What is that but a sense of entitlement? Why should any of us deserve to do meaningful work or work that we enjoy right after a four-year vacation on our parents’ dime? We should be grateful for any opportunity to earn an honest living. Besides, it’s our fault that reality tv is so popular.

So, this is exciting! When I had the idea to make a blog about pyramidroming (OK, so back then it didn’t have a name yet, whatever), I knew I’d need a fabulous friend to take on the beast with me. I was thinking of people I know who are smart, artistic, hilariously sarcastic and (yes) FUNEMPLOYED, and my good friend Liz Galvao immediately jumped to mind. Liz writes a great blog that I read all the time, and YOU can read it too! It’s here: THESE MODERN SOCKS.

Liz graduated with me from Vassar and currently lives in the great state of New Jersey. As a fellow “I majored in something super fun and completely irrelevant to the real world” type of person, Liz shares a lot of my sentiments. In her post, she contemplates the road ahead and gives the thumbs up to all the dirty Jersey drivers she passes on the highway of life:

SO, WHAT’S NEXT?

Recently, my neighbor across the street called out to me as I was walking out to my car. “Did you graduate?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said, with a forced smile.

“Oh, congratulations,” she replied earnestly. “So, what’s next?”

“I don’t know.”

She gave me the thumbs-up and said, “Sounds good.”

No, it didn’t sound good, but I can’t blame her for not knowing the appropriate thing to say. I’ve been known to involuntarily throw a thumbs-up or two out of sheer awkwardness myself. The truth is, I’ve had a harder time accepting the congratulations I’ve received since graduating college than the uncomfortable responses to, “No, I don’t have a job.” It was never my idea to leave college in the first place. Sure, after four years, writing term papers and drinking foamy keg beer got a little old. But who’d want to leave an environment where you have almost all of the freedoms of adulthood with hardly any of the responsibilities?

I certainly didn’t. But, of course, reality and my student loans came knocking, and I begrudgingly graduated with the rest of the class of 2009. In all the photos from my commencement I have a look of sick terror on my face. None of us had jobs. Oh, the occasional well-connected kid had a paid internship, and a few were staving off the inevitable with graduate school, but the vast majority of us were flung out into the real world with the future completely blank. For a group of people who’d up to that point had a step-by-step plan for their lives laid out for them by guidance counselors and parents, it was overwhelming to be told, “Good luck!” in a way that meant, “It’s all up to you now!”

I majored in film in college with an emphasis on production. This means that many of my assignments basically consisted of a group of us being given equipment and told to go make a short film. It was as good an approach as any to teaching a medium best learned from experience. The results varied from hilariously self-important to surprisingly beautiful.

But like I said, film skills are best acquired through experience, and in graduating college I realized how much more of that I needed in order to actually call myself a professional filmmaker. At graduation my brother asked me, “So now, could you, like, direct a TV show?” Well, no. I could maybe direct a viral YouTube video, if I had my own camera, which I don’t. What a great idea, developing a passion for the most expensive medium outside of bedazzling human skulls with diamonds.

What can you do when you have almost no real industry experience and the economy is the worst since the Great Depression? For one thing, you can write for your friend’s blog about being alternatively employed. Another option is to do unpaid work. Directly after graduation I worked on a professor’s extremely low budget short film with several other recent graduates. It was a strange experience shooting on our now-empty campus and breaking into parts of buildings I’d never been in four years. It was even weirder staying in a dorm again after a year in senior housing. Ultimately, though, it was a fitting goodbye to my college years. The twelve-hour days kept me from thinking about my friends scattering all over the country, and being a part of a project so saturated in earnestness cheered me up considerably. There were other ways of becoming a filmmaker besides instantly getting hired by Harvey Weinstein.

Currently I’m living in the oft-mocked state of New Jersey with my parents and trying to live and work in New York City. In my writings on this blog I hope to chronicle my growth from amateur to professional, and share some of my friends’ experiences making their ways up from the bottom in this difficult economy. My parents have given me a great deal of (unsolicited) advice since graduation. In hearing how they’d approach looking for a job I’ve realized how different the process is now from when they were new graduates in the late sixties. I look forward to finding out more about what sets my generation apart as we enter the workforce. I still have no idea what’s next, but figuring it out in a whole new way sounds good to me.