before the mortgage
I’m enjoying the essays and anecdotes at Before the Mortgage. (”Essays, lists, and ephemera for the years post-college and pre-picket fence.”) They’re pegging me pretty good. The relationship mis-fires and dating confusion, the quitting the job to do something absurd, the “work on being at peace with the fact that there may never be a mortgage.”
I remember knowing the editors of the new book at school as second-degree friends. I think we lived in the same co-op for a while. So maybe it’s not too surprising that the arcs of our lives and those of the contributors to their book have so far since then had similar features. 20-somethings, nomadic, educated, intelligent, and capable, but somehow feeling fundamentally clueless — and enjoying that. My peeps.
I’m taking a class called “Professional Practice” concerning the business of architectural practice. It’s wholly anti-thetical to everything I’ve ever thought of myself as being interested in: profits (for their own sake), entrepreneurship (as an end in itself), marketing (as an explicit tool for profit, not for merely getting the word out), company structure, cash flow, pro formas (I’m still not sure what those are), tax law, etc. The odd thing is — and maybe this is just my interest pack-rat-ism talking — I’m starting to like it. And I’m starting to see how, you know? This making money thing? Maybe not such a bad idea.
We have to come up with business plans in groups. They’re for how we would start up our own architectural firms, which I’m precisely 0.1% likely to do, but as the opaque thing that is the business world starts to reveal itself to me, I’m starting to understand how kind of cool it would be to build something yourself, to make money on your own. How you can be ethical and honest and eke out a living on your own terms, doing what you want to do. Theoretically.
But nahhh: primarly, that’s my exceptional level of indebtedness talking. I’d love to make money for long enough to pay off my debt. Then I figure myself for going nomadic again. I’d rather just stay nomadic, actually, but it’s becoming more and more obviously untenable. Of course, this is me talking, still in my 20s. By the time I dig in enough to break even, perhaps the quarter-life-crisis endemic to the Before the Mortgage crowd will have sorted itself out and I’ll be past that phase.
Anyway, all I know is that the brakes appear to be broken, I’ve already passed a couple of exits, and I have another year of grad school before I can shift lanes.