“Can I just.. water, please,” I say to the guy standing behind the register. I can never tell if these folks get frustrated with people like me – people who go to cafes and ask for some free water. If dude had a problem with my ilk, he didn’t let on. He simply nodded, his minidreads shifting along with his head before passing my order along to a co-worker.

Me and my free water stayed in a corner of the café for maybe ten minutes, waiting. I went over in my head my last two weeks. My gig at the campaign was rough – I got into the office, which was actually located in an outdoor mall in downtown Charlottesville, every day around nine AM and reported to a supervisor. He or she would typically send me and a partner out to some corner of the city to register voters. “Remember, Jon… this is how we win the election. The margin of victory comes down to the number of people you register!”

There were tons of slogans political workers throw around constantly on campaigns. Personally, I feel most of them are meaningless. For instance, whenever any sign of reluctance crept across my face, a supervisor would grin and say “ Fired up!,” with the expectation that I would exclaim back “ready to go!” To describe my retort as tepid would be a redefinition of the adjective. I often shrugged and walked away.

Another favorite saying was “do whatever it fucking takes” whenever I pondered how to go about accomplishing a certain goal. How do I go about getting 25 people to register to vote in the parking lot of a WalMart? By doing whatever it fucking took, obviously. Some nights I didn't make it back to the office til six P.M.. From there, I'd make recruitment calls and persuasion calls til around 10 P.M., then document all that I did and the results I achieved til around midnight.

Oftentimes I was lucky to get one or two people to register to vote on any given day til the college kids started rolling in again. As the July sun beat the fuck out of my body on one of those off days, I gave my pal Julian a call.

Like me, Julian left our law school prior to completing his degree. Unlike me, he had no intention of going back. Instead, he dedicated himself to his artistic craft: filmmaking. A part of me was jealous at the man’s courage.. it took a lot of it to say no to the keys to comfort and instead try to make a living selling as subjective as art. But I reckon that’s what made him a true artist and me.. well, me.

That, and the fact that I had concrete reasons for wanting to be a lawyer whereas I think Julian did not see much utility in the occupation itself… but when Harvard comes calling, most pick up and never hangup.

“Of course, man. Of course there was doubt. But I just knew I wasn’t meant to be there. I knew that I was meant to do something else… so, you know, I just did it. You only get to live through this shit once, so why not do it right?”
Waiting at that café for my mentor, too scared to spend a buck fifty on some tea, I wondered if I as truly following his advice.

Yeah I really just like him for his money. Money money, mm mm mm mm mmmm yeah.

What if "do whatever it fucking takes" = hold their kids hostage until they register? WHAT THEN, SYSTEM.
» randomjunk on 2013-02-07 12:01:46

haha to rj. I do think that your friend did the right thing to follow his dreams. If I were your friend, though, I probably would have gotten my Harvard degree, THEN 'given it all up' to live the dream (depending on how far I was through my program). I might have even graduated, worked a year, put 100k+ in a Roth-IRA and THEN 'given it all up' to live the dream. People think that in order to live your dream you have to take a giant leap into nothingness... I think you just have to identify what it is that you really want, and then make a strategy to get there. It isn't like suffering horribly is required for dream achievement. You never know when having a degree at Harvard Law might come in handy in filmmaking. My dad quit being a lawyer after 30 years of actively practicing law, but he still uses his law degree (and the skills he learned there) all the time- in business, in local government, to help his employees who can't afford lawyers to get their kids back or to settle their debts. Suffering horribly for your dream is often just the consequence of taking rash action, not the consequence of following your dream. I have a friend who is almost a nurse. She wants to be a TV chef. She's a great cook, but she's never really cooked anything professionally before. Should she follow her dream of being a TV chef? Of course she should. Should she quit her nursing program right before she graduates to follow her dream? No! She should finish her degree and start building her cooking portfolio on the side, taking pictures of things she makes, trying out new recipes. Then she can gradually transition from nursing to cooking, in direct proportion to how much she enjoys each one and what kind of success she is having. Your dream to work on the Obama campaign had a deadline, but these other dreams don't. I had a dream to travel the world-- I could have gotten a crappy corporate job and then I could have rashly left said job to go live my dream to travel the world, or I could carefully plan my future so that my stable job also paid for me to travel. I think if you start to realize that you are on the wrong path in life, you don't always have to leap off the path into a patch of thistles... you just have to start laying down flagstones that take you back to where you want to be.
» Zanzibar on 2013-02-07 06:00:04

That job sounds like it would have been exhausting. And scary. Were people mean to you? I've witness people yell at canvassers/people trying to get others to register to vote.
» Amelie on 2013-02-07 12:44:36

Yeah, I know. :P
» Zanzibar on 2013-02-07 04:40:10

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