Sample Platter - Journal Entry - Mark Cohen (Rent)
Apparently, I'm nineteen again and my mother is in complete control over eighty-five percent of my life. Here's the thing: she set up a job interview for me. I made the mistake of getting the phone last night, thinking it might have been...actually, I have no fucking idea who I thought it could be. Mom was using her mind control powers, is what happened. Anyhow, I pick up and the first words out of her mouth are, "Guess what I've done for you!" And not in the I've-knitted-you-another-pot-holder tone, this was the I've-made-a-life-decision-for-you voice. I know this one well. It was the same voice that showed up when I was supposed to be choosing my non-film classes at NYU. According to them, choosing to go to NYU, after actually being accepted to Brown (oh, the umbrage!), I gave up my right to pick my own classes. Which was complete bullshit, if you ask me. I still don't know what kind of fucking lab science she and my dad thought was supposed to help me get into the film department. ...Notice the huge digression from the job interview to "This is why I dropped out of school, in case you missed it the first hundred times."

So back to the job. Potential job. (That I don't want.) Sort of. But first, can I hate my parents, a little more? I'm furious at her. I haven't been this angry since college. It's not even easy to say, "Oh, she's just looking out for me." No. She's controlling me, in that horrible, guilt-filled Mom way. If I don't do this, I'll be throwing away another chance at a brighter, financially secure future. If I keep wasting my time the way I do now (you know, with all this nothing that I'm really doing), I'll never get anywhere. Don't I want a real career? Don't I want to make my parents proud? Actually, Mom, I stopped worrying about that after my bar mitzvah. If I was still trying to make you guys proud, I would have gone to fucking Brown, studied something that would kepe me in school well into my thirties, then graduate and throw all that hard work down the drain to become a fucking rabbi. Apparently, I still owe them for all that. One would think that having to put up with set-up after set-up - whether for job, school, or even date - would be payement aplenty. But no. I'm twenty-three and still expected to follow these orders.

I'm not frowning on having money, of course. And having a job would certainly mean having money. Trouble is, I'd have to make the money. Work for it. I think we all remember the disaster that was my last money-making venture at McDonalds in junior year. (Yeah, I don't want to talk about it, either.) How do I know this next thing won't be exactly the same? I have so many reasons to hate it already:

1. It was Mom's idea.
2. She set up the interview without telling me.
3. Her connections go as follows: It's her friend's sister's sons's father's brother's nephew's cousin's former roommate ex-partner's business. She has met him all of two times. Briefly.
4. Have I mentioned it's a portrait studio? So I'd get to just barely not do what I want to do.

Still photography, don't get me wrong, is great, but a portrait studio? Fuck, Mom, if I wanted to do that, I would be working at a fucking department store. Apparently, though, the guy who owns the place - his name is Wesley, Mom says - has been running it by himself for a couple of years and is finally getting busy enough that he needs an assistant. She said it was a position intended for people with no experience, though, and it'll probably start out as a bunch of clerical shit, but if I "show him my stuff", I'll surely "knock his socks off" and he'll just have to let me behind the camera. Yeah, a gay photographer who's used to working alone is really gonna give up the reigns to me once he sees my stellar polaroid collection of the weird things my dogs and friends do. I would have to count myself lucky if he even let me dust the backdrops.

I don't want to do this, I don't want to do this, I don't want to do this.

But you know what? I'm gonna fucking do it, again submitting to my mother's will. I all too often forget that, really, most times, the easiest way to get her off my back is to just do what she says. (Or maybe I just do that because I have a paranoid fear that she's constantly watching me. We want you, Big Mother.) Resistance is futile. If I do this and just tell her it didn't work out, when it doesn't work out, she'll leave me alone for another couple of days. (I should really know this by now.) Not to mention, I'd sort of feel bad for standing up this Wesley fellow when he was nice enough to schedule an interview with me, through my mother. I mean, granted, I'll be wasting his time, but at least I'll be wasting it in a way that he's expecting to have it be wasted.

I don't know. Roger, you're a working stiff, now. What do you think?

In an unrelated story, Gordon, I speak on behalf of Collins and myself when I say we'd like you to know that you're our new hero. And no, of course, we're not just saying this because our puppies are enough to bend your will. Everyone who works at the Life Cafe should aspire to be as generous as you, man.