I’m sad that I’m a Cubicle Monkey.Sigh.
Karma Bum and Nine first became friends back in 2001, on the campus of their shared alma mater. They did not know each other in school, but met after graduation through a mutual friend.
At the time, Karma Bum had just quit his job at an investment bank in Texas and either was about to go to Australia for 3 months, or had just returned from a 3 month hiatus Down Under. My memory is fuzzy on this point. Regardless, he was between things. Nine was biding her time since her original job offer at a major consulting firm in Manhattan had unceremoniously dumped her and put her on “holding status” for a year, leaving her with a check for $15k in her hand and a big question mark as to what to do with herself in the meantime and whether she really still had a job. Privately, she thought the $15k was kiss-off money. She turned out to be wrong. This may be one of the few times in history that a major corporation has kept its word to a peon employee.
Karma Bum is a younger Fisher now Josh, and Nine is a younger Ink now SusieDerkins. SusieDerkins at the age of 22 to be exact. They found each other to disturbingly be the opposite-sex-version of each other. Which was good and bad. Good, because shared pet peeves are always fun to complain about. But irritating, because who wants to hang out with another version of themself all day? Hello, we are unique people. And one thing we do share is this pride in being unique and one-of-a-kind. Even if it’s secretly so because our outer shells reveal us to be just another peon. In Medical School in my case. Or Cubicle Monkey in his case.
When they were introduced while visiting their alma mater back in 2002, they did not exchange business cards, or phone numbers, or even last names. They exchanged blog URL’s. Fisher was the only other blogger I knew, and blogging was something that was a secret guilty pleasure back then. It wasn’t as prevalent and I felt like a big dork. I still feel like a big dork sometimes. And it’s still somewhat secret. At that moment, he became one of the few people I knew in Real Life who also knew me in BloggerSphere. He knew me and also knew my alter ego – Nine. Then he knew Ink. And now SusieDerkins. The multiple incarnations.
We bonded over the shared secret desire to be writers and the not-so-secret desire to live comfortably. As individuals who come from firmly middle class backgrounds, there was no trust fund in sight for us to live off of while we pursued careers in writing. It was either live poorly and write. Or live well and write in secret. So, I am in medical school, and he is in business development. Both of us had a brief flirtation with the thought of going to journalism school.
These days, we talk like we’re 90 years old. We talk of all that we could’ve been, and we talk about the dreams and ideas that were never realized. We talk of what we’ve become and how different it is from who we thought we’d be. We talk about all of this in the relatively safety of hindsight and retrospect. Because at the end of the day, what we really are is Risk Averse. We would’ve liked to be writers. But only if it meant some sort of guarantee that we’d still be okay. I want a warranty on my attempt at journalism school. And both of us held the secret fear – what if it’s not all that we hoped?
After all, Fisher was the one who inadvertently prompted me to leave consulting and pursue medicine. It was the fateful phone/IM conversation in which he uttered the words, Do you ever feel like – even though you got all that you asked for, it’s not all that you wanted? Sitting on the bed in my hotel room, surrounded by all my client papers and presentations, that statement rang of truth. And so I left.
These days, both of us have left New York City. Fisher is now Josh-in-San Francisco, and I am now SusieDerkins-in-Philadelphia. Despite the long distance, Fisher’s one of those friends that still manages to influence me from afar. Through book recommendations, the occasional rare conversation (we’re much more online people than phone people), and of course – his blog updates. I think writing will always be a part of both of our lives. It’s fundamental to who we are. I’m not certain we need to make a living by it. Or even if making a living is the best way to do justice to our love of writing. In a lot of ways, making your income dependent on something destroys it. Though secretly – both of us want to publish a novel. Or at least he does. I wouldn’t mind seeing Ordered Chaos and Eidolon in paperback format sitting on my bookshelf, but I’d be just as happy seeing it self-published and only on my shelf as I would be having it mass produced. I don’t have such lofty aspirations. Writing a novel for commercial purposes is too involved and too much of a commitment, and we all know I have commitment problems. I’d be happy with the occasional gig writing an article for a magazine.
Or writing the occasional chapter for Let’s Go Travel Guides. Oh God – best job ever. I think I’d live my life best occasionally. Occasionally doing this or that, just to keep things interesting. - The Story of Fisher and Writing