Tough Life or Why Hot-shit Young New writers Suck
Oh yeah I wish I could be like this guy. [Gawker]
Brian, a 26-year-old M.F.A. candidate in fiction, earns a modest living from teaching, assisting professors, and writing magazine articles. His parents pay his tuition as well as a $140-a-month gym membership at Equinox. The rent for his half of a West Village two-bedroom is $1,800 a month, most of it covered by his parents. Each month, Brian pays $125 for cable and Internet access,$59.31 on his Verizon cell-phone bill, and $96.67 for a shared desk at Paragraph, a writing space.I thought that, like, Starbucks was a "writing space." There're about eight things wrong with this character(ization).
I probably constituted this meaning a little askew, though, through a vaseline-smeared lens of schadenfreude. How I wish I were one of the few, the proud: the (rich) parent-supported. I'm sitting here looking at two ppl, a guy and a girl, eating some sandwiches at the counter. They're dressed in fatigues, and the guy has a little nick on the back of his buzzcut head. And a weak chin. The guy just got up to grab a napkin and I saw his name sewn on his uniform. "Fike." I bet MFA Brian has nice features, and his $1,680/annum gym membership probably keeps him in better shape than military training. His heart, I'm sure, is stronger for not having to fear the fall of a mortarshell, shrapnel and rubble flying, and the immanent loss of limb that should follow. I'd give anything not to have to support myself; I'd join the army too if I didn't think it would fuck me up, which would thereby negate or render useless the whole end behind not having to support myself.
