By Gina Curreri, Staff Writer
We all read The Huffington Post. It’s nowhere near good and far from credible, but for a quick read on some new whacko survey or study, HuffPo’s got you covered. The blog section supposedly features “fresh takes and real-time analysis from HuffPost’s signature lineup of contributors.” Well, okay.
“A Struggle for Not Struggling,” a Tuesday, July 10 blogpost, was truly signature. The writer started off rough after she listed “Sex and the City” protagonist Carrie Bradshaw as her journalistic inspiration growing up. Oh, yes. Writing about sex and men and trolling all over the city is what I dreamed of as a 10-year-old, too. I couldn’t tell if the writer was joking with that serious jab to all diehard journo fans. I let it slide and continued reading.
Side note: I let her inconsistency between using the serial comma and not using the serial comma slide, too.
She wanted this 10-cents-a-word freelancer life as a real New York City journalist. She wanted the big time: a life of journalism that’s thrilling but doesn’t pay all that well. But now she’s graduated, she started a 401k as a 22-year-old, bought a car and is too well-off to live that old dream. That. Old. Dream. In true Carrie Bradshaw fashion, “Can you make a mistake and miss your fate?”
She thinks she has. She’s too successful. She wants those poor years everyone has after college, eating ramen with loads of credit card debt like the characters on “Girls.” She’s bummed she has a career. She can’t live on mom and dad’s dime. (As if that would even be a poor life at all. You should be so lucky.)
The entire piece is really bizarre. A first-person account as a 22-year-old that reads as a modest brag with a tinge of “poor me” that will live online forever is something she’ll surely regret.
“Is the quarter-life crisis just not having a full-time job and living with your parents, or is it realizing that you have to choose some irreversible path for your life?” she said.
She said what? She’s an editorial assistant at StudentAdvisor, according to her Twitter account. Hell, she’s on the brink of retirement. There’s never going to be an opportunity for her to drop everything and move to New York City after working at this place full-time for three months. Life’s a whole quarter over!
Maybe she meant well. I can see where she was trying to go, but it came off horribly. The Internet’s all over it already.
Plus, the writer graduated from Northeastern last spring. The only valid conclusion from all this? BU trumps Northeastern. (Duh.) Okay, joking. That’s clearly extrapolating data from one example. We communication majors take statistics now. But at one point she does say her Northeastern professors “discouraged” students from careers in journalism. Nice program, Huskies.
Follow Gina on Twitter at @ginacurreri
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